Chapter 9 – “The Future of Writing Ability” by Robert Gundlach – in REL: 247-263.

We have computers, which provide us with “a reconfiguration of human abilities”; we don’t need to memorize lists of spelling words, nor even the rules of grammar with spell check, interactive programming, bla, bla, bla.

Change! “Changing contexts, changing spheres of knowledge, changing roles for readers and writers, changing relations of power and authority [hopefully changes in underwear too]… the future of writing ability will be shaped by shifts in the ecology of discourse in which developing writers find themselves. These shifts might be brought about by the use of new technology, by new social and cultural arrangements, or, most likely, by technological change and social change.” Wow. No kidding. Do we need a 20 page essay to tell us this! All this change, just makes a fellow dizzy. Jason Epstein is quoted: “The invention of movable type created opportunities for writers that that could barely be imagined in Gutenberg’s day. The opportunities that await writers in the near future are immeasurably greater.” Oh, brave new world, that hath such computers in it. Writers using computers to create multi-media texts.

Gundlach speaks of change but has no sense of radical change, it’s “change,” developmental and incremental. This is typical of bourgeois thinking. Radical change for them is too risky, may lose them some of their privilege and power. Gundlach is pretty much happy with the way things are and with his knowledge of how the world works!

He needs to pay more attention to his own writing ability or lack thereof. This is an example of the worst kind of scholarly writing. It seems to be telling us what we already know in language we can’t understand.

Gundlach says that “the abiding question in my own work is how people learn to use written language to say what they want or need to say.” How naive is this! Fifty years of poststructuralism has already demonstrated that we can never mean what we say, nor say what we mean. Does he think there exists some kind of pre-language non-discursive, pre-verbal faculty, which “knows” the “rightness” of the words which we come up with? If if he wants to challenge poststructuralism on this, he must argue it. He can’t just pass it over, without commentary, especially in an article which purports to be a kind of bibliographic essay on the major thinking on language acquisition and use.

I defy anyone to tell me what there is to learn from reading this article? Here’s a writing lesson for Gundlach; try to avoid sounding like the slave in Waiting for Godot, when he is commanded to think. He spits out a reducto ad absurdum of “scholarly” thinking, citing and squawking out the names of authorities and sources for his gibberish. All these sources and authorities! Such a display of  learning and erudition. Such sharing of the benefits of his labors. What’s this essay even about? How people will learn to write in the future and thus develop writing ability? What we need to pay attention to as writing instructors in the development of our students? What’s at stake in the conflict between Chomsky’s standard model and this other more use based theory. In the future one learns to “reintegrate writing with speech, drawing, and other systems of symbolic representation.” Indeed, “multi-media” texts. Wow. Who ever heard of such a thing!.

Finally, we are addressed explicitly as writing instructors: “The teaching of writing can be understood as an effort to contribute to the future of writing ability [last sentence].”  Sounds good! Especially when we writing instructors understand that learning to write begins before our intervention and will continue after our instruction ends. It’s on ongoing process and we ought to orient ourselves toward the future in that, perhaps, we will teach multi-media writing.

What does the “future of writing ability” mean? How people will write in the future, that is, with the use of interactive mechanized help from computer programs? How writing ability might be redefined in the future? The very concept of writing ability will be changed in the future? Why not just say “writing ability?” Because the future of writing ability includes a sense in which writing ability might be something entirely different from what it is considered to be right now. The closest thing to any practical advice might be glimpsed in his offhand remarks about “multi-media texts,” which of course are already here.

"Waiting for Godot" with Sex: Seeing The Band’s Visit politically.

I want to thank my wife Donna, for, even though she was tired and didn’t want to be lectured to about film theory, her presence nevertheless, after a long 5 days absence, got picked up by me at the airport and was there in the family room, nodding off, while I clarified for myself out loud some ideas about film I had been mulling over in relation to The Band’s Visit (2008).

We don’t interpret films; they interpret us (or interpellate us, to use Althusser’s term), which is to say, films construct for us a subject position and call us to identify with it, from which we are able to make sense of the “Real.” (By the “Real,” I don’t mean the actual, but the socially constructed “Real” of ideology). These subject positions (which entail also a concept of what it means to be an “individual”) are made to seem intelligible by situating them within those larger frames of intelligibility available at this time in history (global capitalism). In other words, film is the medium through which we are instructed in the nature of the “Real.”  Where else but from film do we get our sense of “how the world works”? Of course, we think that we already know how the world works from “experience” [unmediated, direct knowledge] and we judge film on the basis of how well it reflects or fails to reflect the “real world.”

Film teaches us to make sense of the flux of actuality out there, by turning it into the “Real,” which is still “out there” (external to us) but which now makes sense. Because of the tales movies tell us and teach us to construct, we are enabled to make sense of the world out there and ourselves in it. To do this, film constructs for us a subject position, which “explains” the world in such a way that it seems to make sense, even under world-wide conditions of ruthless exploitation, which is to say, it’s an ideological subject position, which film provides us, which casts us viewers into the position of already always having understood the way things are. We are of course offered no subject positions which would contest this ”way things are.” No, such positions are always already outside the frame of intelligibility needed by world capitalism. To the extent that a movie makes sense to you, you will find that the “Real” makes sense to you too, it’s “the way things are.” Thus, the Real is fetishized. And thus, such questions as: What about 2 million children living on the streets in cities around the world! Whose desire is this? And with whom are we implicated in allowing it? – such questions are ruled unintelligible or else given the answer, “That’s just the way things are.”

So, if I tell the tale of The Band’s Visit, what do I come up with? It’s a tale mainly about subject positions within what Raymond William calls the “structure of feeling,” available at this time (late capitalism) for gendered subjects. It tells a tale of the feminine and the male (heterosexual), the range of their possible behavior toward each other, on the level of “intimacy,”either sexual or verbal. It tells a tale of the nature of loneliness, as the outside of intimacy. The tale of the film is in effect: All are lonely, it’s part of the human condition, it’s with you even in a room with nothing but a lamp and a sleeping baby. It is possible to overcome it through the practice of intimacy, either of a discursive or of a sexual nature, but it is unlikely to be enduring, in either case.

The film is telling you that if you are a woman pushing middle age and you are stuck out in the middle of nowhere permanently and you are lonely and a bit desperate, having an affair with a married man is understandable, even if he is a “Kalb.” Don’t give up, you can still allow your life force expression. Be as free as you want sexually, be natural, use a man to make your lover jealous, if you want; go ahead, indulge in sexual fantasy, if you want, but don’t let it get out of control. If you can’t be with the one you love, love the one you’re with. You are a sexual woman! A natural woman! You are a good woman. Remember your femininity is not only your sexuality but also your general attitude of friendliness and helpfulness, nurturing qualities, even mothering, even though you are being punished for your fooling-around past, as it were, by your infertility now, that’s a minor issue.

If you are a man of the professional managerial class, being pushed by middle age and a guilty, almost debilitating, past, forget about sex. You’ve got responsibilities, you’ve got to keep an eye on people and organize things. You can appreciate a beautiful woman, though, and perhaps feel a little sad about their loss, but you have had an “exchange of quiet desperation” (Ebert), call it verbal intimacy, with her and it was nice, but you do have your work and your work is music which is feeling and beyond discursive contestation and grounded in nature; feelings are natural, are they not? And thus serve to ground the whole film-ideology in nature, which is what ideology does; it attempts to naturalize the Real, turn it into the way things are now, yesterday and forever, amen. You can be called a good man. And, at the end of the movie, it turns out that the Manager General is a superb singer of beautiful classic Arabic music, the first a dirge with soul; the second, lighter, happy even.

If you’re a young guy, get it while you can! That’s only natural. Just show up and do a good job tomorrow at work! We’ll be watching you.

This movie is supposed to take place in the present (2008), just three years before the Egyptian Revolution, which began as a workers rebellion against the State over economic issues of joblessness and low pay. Clearly, the Egyptian revolution marks the first great experience in a new period of international revolutionary struggles. There is however no sense of these Egyptians having been stirred by any anticipation of social unrest, let alone revolution back home.

The film does gesture toward the memory of the Yom Kippur War (1973), which almost resulted in the defeat of the Israeli Army. The film implies that the legacy of that war can be overcome with more “intimacy” or “sharing of their common humanity” between these former enemies. Intimacy is privileged in this film as a zone free from politics and strife, the concept of intimacy is “private” and as such posits the existence of the unique individual with a public and a private self; one need do hardly more than point to the “obviousness” and “common sense” of it. With this private self,  one is a free individual to enter into contracts, make decisions based on one’s experience. In other words, this private self authorizes and legitimates the humanist, liberal concept of the self as solitary (lonely) and situated beyond all discursive contestations or interventions as relatively fixed and stable and unitary and present to itself in its full plenitude and available to others (often even bodily available) in a state of fully transparent intimacy, if the individual chooses.

The film posits as solution to the world’s strife (Egyptian vs Israeli, eg), individual voluntary acts of intimacy across national, racial and religious divides. Class divisions however are untouched and remain the unspoken of the film.

Sex or verbal intimacy is the only possibility, given the circumstances, which loom large but remain unspoken, limiting the realm of the possible to just this. Intimacy in its sexual form is offered as compensation for lives of boredom, deadendedness, quiet desperation and loneliness. Music is the metaphor for “natural” (beyond discussion) feelings of intimacy and sexuality. Twafiq sings sexy songs.

That’s why this film seems to push the limits of what’s permissible regarding sexual morality (extra marital sex, recreational sex), which gives it its avant-guard quality.  Puritanical Islam’s critique of Western sexual morality is ruled out of bounds. It’s unnatural and outdated in this context.

By taking this seemingly ultra liberal permissive view , the film ideology signals that it doesn’t really care about sex much at all. What it is concerned with is establishing the naturalness of the world capitalist order by constructing subject positions (film viewers), from which perspective, within the structure of feeling historically available, the self as “private individual” is safeguarded and it’s from this subject position that “the ways things are” is made intelligible, and becomes the Real.

Charlie Hynes

English 440-Cultural Criticism

Professor: Michelle Kells

October 1, 2012

Presentation

CULTURAL CRITICISM CHAPTER 6

·         ANTHROPOLOGISTS “see culture as the central organizing concept in their discipline.”(page 136,CC)

·         “culture refers to the pattern of beliefs and values, reflected in artifacts, objects, and institutions, that is passed on from generation to generation.”(page 136, CC)

·         SOCIOLOGISTS define “culture” with a number of variables.  Some of these variables concentrate on where you are from, your religious beliefs, economic status within your region, and your first language.

·         Being “cultured” is a term describing people we have all heard.  Being “cultured”, or “non-cultured” is an insinuation that one either does, or does not engage in their cultures offerings of “fine arts”, such as the opera, or classical music, or the ballet.

QUESTION #1.  Do you see yourself as being a cultured individual as before defined?

·         POPULAR CULTURE as we know it is all about what is happening now, and is consumed my mass group populations.  Wrap music and cartoons, media such as magazines and talk shows, sports and fashions.  In the 1970’s bell bottom pants were an expression of pop-culture.  Today “The John Stewart Show” is a media based expression of our popular culture.  His following is large, his humor is hip and sharp, and we are engaged in his rhetoric and sense of “popular culture.”

QUESTION #2.  What are some examples we can come up with of the most popular examples of “pop culture” today?”

·         ELITE CULTURE as described by postmodernists, as well as our “Cultural Criticism” text on page 138 to paraphrase refers to things like the opera or classical comedies by Shakespeare, or paintings.

QUESTION #3.  How does our text mediate the middle ground between popular culture and elite culture-what do you think tempers this shady ground?

By expanding our search and moving forward into a multicultural identity we are acknowledging the diversity of a singular larger culture.  This is apparent here in the United States where “Multiculturalism” is as abundant as the diverse ethnic, religious, socioeconomic, and regionally diverse backgrounds we all stem from.  We have gay communities, exclusive clubs, political diversity, generally a large group of people who do have strong differences in their beliefs on a large scale.  It is no wonder our universities have expanded with their “Cultural-Multicultural” studies programs.  To live in the United States, and elsewhere, although, I would argue to lesser degrees than here, is to be immersed in a “multicultural” field study on a daily basis.  There are strong bias’ that are constantly being tugged at in our cultures efforts to move forward, and I believe that of itself is the definition of multiculturalism. 

·         DWEMS=DEAD WHITE EUROPEAN MALES

·         LWEMS=LIVIND, OR RECENTLY DECEASED WHITE EUROPEAN MALES

QUESTION #3.  What is the significance of these two groups in relationship to “Political Correctness?”

·         POLITICAL CORRECTNESS according to our “Cultural Criticism” text is a term under “contention”, and possibly being used to stereotype certain professors as Marxist, or left wing.  To paraphrase a section of the text; it seems conservatives are using the term “political correctness” in an attempt to keep collegiate curriculum s from becoming anymore multicultural in nature.  There is a discrepancy in ideological thought and the usage of the term “political correctness” is being used as ammunition from the conservative right against the liberal left.

QUESTION #4.  In the past “anomic behavior” could be tied to the gay and lesbian movement.  Today, how would we define “anomic behavior?

·         FUNCTIONALISM is the glue that holds our society together; “the institutions, entities and practices of our society.” (page 146, CC)  Sociologists use functionalism to determine whether institutions are benefiting our society or not.  It has been criticized as being a conservative practice of sociologists but, sociologists contend its practice is useful in its approach to learning the value of certain institutions. 

Question #5.  From a functionalist perspective can we evaluate how two antagonistic religious factions might come into contention with each other and cause social unrest?

·         SACRED/PROFANE Durkheim “explains how religious thought divided the world into two distinctive spheres.” (page 148, CC)

·         “Utopian movements such as Marxism are tied to the eschatological myth of the redeeming few.”(page 149, CC)

·         “Nudism and sexual freedom movements are connected to the notion of human innocence before the Fall and a nostalgia for Eden.” (page 149, CC)

·         THEORIES OF MASS MEDIA TERMS “1.  USES AND GRATIFICATION THEORY.  2.  DEPENDENCY THEORY.  3.  AGENDA SETTING THEORY.  3.  CULTIVATION THEORY.  4.  GATE-KEEPING THEORY.  5.  TWO-STEP FLOW THEORY.  6.  HYPODERMIC THEORY.  7.  SPIRAL OF SILENCE THEORY.”(pages 151-152, CC)

I had no real interest in this section above so I just listed the key terms and not their definitions.  If we wish to discuss them we can go back to the book.

·         MASS SOCIETY.  The metaphor in the book sums this theory up well.  To paraphrase and pose as a question; Have you ever felt like you were just a grain of sand on an endless beach?

The influence from mass media onto mass society has become a way to get large groups of people in an otherwise alienating setting to have a commonality with their emotions and feelings in response to the mass medias entertainment value; true, or false?  If it is true, then I feel like a puppet.

Is the medium more important than the message as Mcluhan from our text argues?  How may our media intake be affecting the way we learn as we evolve as a species? 

The media loves to stereotype, by this I mean the advertisers who are trying to sell their product during our favorite t.v. shows.  Is it working?  Do they know what you want by knowing what you watch?

            As we consider this chapter in “Cultural Criticism” it is easy to see how the world just keeps growing.  It is a little off topic, but in 1970 there were just under 3 billion people on the planet.  That is the year I was born.  As we are closing in on 7 billion people on the planet isn’t it more apparent today that we keep a liberal view toward curriculum, like a growing interest in the study of multiculturalism, and allow it to grow just as our population has been.  “We” should be trying to understand each other even more as our population grows and we move closer to each other, literally, closer to each other.  There is nowhere to hide in this world anymore, no more hidden island tribes or Amazon tribes, people are integrated, for the most part in western cultures, and integrating more and more every day.