Against the Sophists

A while back, I had posted a mock cover for a comic book based on Isocrates' "Against the Sophists." The whole piece is likely beyond my talents to complete, but the first line seems really fitting for the contemporary higher education environment.

On Podcasting

One of my recent experiments in binary invention has been the development of a podcast with my colleague, Joel Jonientz. Like most of Joel’s ideas, the podcast began with a simple premise: “Let’s talk about interesting topics.” Obviously, that wouldn’t help us stand out in the podcasting marketplace and it wouldn’t do much to provide an editorial voice to the end-product. But Joel’s motivations were instructive: he thinks academics are most interesting when the talk about things beyond their academic interests. For academics, that probably sounds flattering. For non-academics, it’s probably evidence of the suspected egotism of the academy.

All that said, we call our podcast Professor Footnote and the more we’ve thought about it, talked about, and explained it to colleagues (or had it explained to us), the podcast presents some interesting scholarly possibilities.

1     It trains us in a new practical pedagogical mode

      It traffics in the politics of discussion

3    It remediates scholarly work

More after the jump

On the Freedom to be Interesting

For the last three years, I’ve been part of a group that organizes and hosts an Arts & Culture Conference at the University of NorthDakota. The conference’s mission: to promote a conversation within our university and our community about the relationship between the arts and public life.

We hold a series of talks on campus, featuring each of our visiting-artists (and thanks to Aristotle’s treatment of techne, we feel confident calling all our guests artists). We feature artistic performances each night of the conference in the downtown community—typically a concert and a film screening. We run an art exhibit at a downtown gallery throughout the month of October, and close the exhibit and the conference on the same evening. We also produce a series of art prints exclusive to the conference that are then archived in the university’s collection.

When we invite our visitors, we ask them to do three things. First, they give a presentation or performance of some kind. Second, the sit on a panel with the other visitors and have a conversation with each other. Third, they visit at least one classroom. Lunches during the conference are also reserved for students and artists.

As a result, our conference engages students inside and outside classroom settings. It brings interesting events and art to the greater community. It puts diverse people into conversation with each other. And if we wanted to examine the macro-economic impact, it feeds a whole bunch of people in area restaurants and contributes to what I can only imagine is a noticeable uptick in the local Old-Fashioned market.

The reasons I lead with this belabored account of the conference is two-fold. First, it is important to recognize how the conference works to understand why I think it is such a vibrant and unique way of doing academic work. Second, it underscores how the institutional mechanics of the university work against that kind of work and imperil a truly interdisciplinary approach to higher education.

When I picked up Kerri Miller, Minnesota Public Radio host and one of our 2013 visiting artists, she asked what her background had to do with this year’s theme, “Cultures of Curation.” The truth is, there are two answers. One answer posits public radio, and Miller’s shows in particular, as gatekeepers of a complex cultural environment, curators of information. The second answer is much more interesting to me: Kerri Miller is interesting. This story can be told about every guest we’ve brought in for the conference. There’s a way to use a theme to justify bringing someone in, but there’s an easier path to identifying potential visitors: by asking if they’re interesting.

Kevin Schreck, the director of Persistence of Vision, came because he messaged Joel Jonientz while Joel was live-tweeting The Thief and the Cobbler during family movie night. Is Persistence of Vision a good example of how the film The Thief and the Cobbler gets made, shaped, and ultimately circulated? Sure. But it’s also interesting. In addition to Miller and Schreck, this year’s conference included art critic David Pagel of the Los Angeles Times, Jennifer Preston of the New York Times, and artist Craig Drennen (who curated the conference exhibit, Canon Fodder).

The point I’m trying to make, hastily and perhaps sloppily, is that a theme (like “curation”) makes your happenings recognizable, but recognition implies familiarity. What if you’re interested in the unfamiliar? What if you want to see what happens when a commercial print journalist, a public radio host, a print journalism art critic, a painter, and a filmmaker get together and have a conversation? Where on your campus is the venue for that kind of trans-disciplinary, trans-professional discussion?

We hear an awful lot of chatter about the desire for an interdisciplinary university, but I’m not sure we’ve thought about what it will look like (as much as we love what it sounds like). I suspect the struggle is a function of wanting it to seem familiar and predictable. I can’t say I knew what last week’s panel discussion was going to produce. I didn’t think it would involve the filmmaker asking the print journalist for a phone number so he could see how “Page One” gets curated. I didn’t think it would involve the radio journalist using a metaphor of a train window spurring on the painter to talk about John Cage’s curation of an art museum. I didn’t think it would result in the print journalist exclaiming that thinking alongside artists was thrilling and insightful. I didn’t know any of those things were going to happen. When the panel wrapped, fellow planner Joel Jonientz asked “Who knew that was going to be interesting?” We did. We didn’t know how or why, but we had complete faith that it would be interesting.

But how to qualify (or even quantify) interesting. Our conference attendance is fair to middling. We had over 100 audience members at about half our events, closer to 60 for the rest. If you divided our budget by our attendance, it isn’t a great deal. But we also put about 40 students around lunch tables with our guests. The first lunch, everybody ate together: artistis, professionals, undergraduates, graduates, Art students, Communication students, English students. The second day, the crowd broke up into smaller groups. We put visitors in classrooms across the disciplines, we brought students from one discipline into the classroom of another. And, perhaps most importantly, students were able to watch and join in a conversation that acknowledged their disciplinary grounding and then mixed it in with other disciplinary backgrounds. The artist can talk with the radio journalist, the print journalist can talk with film-maker and curator. A conference that secretly aims only at interesting (and it has to be a secret, because you don’t fund aimless hunting expeditions) makes it interesting to imagine the role of academia outside its typical structures and strictures.

And that’s all a lot of long talk to note that the Arts & Culture Conference faces an uncertain future. Funding is hard to come by, even harder for an event that has trouble quantifying what it plans to do. For all of the selfless talk about “the interesting” it is important that those involved get recognized for their efforts, and because “the interesting” is a squirrely metric, the work gets conflated with other speaker-series and academic conference activities on campus. In an institution where credit, recognition, and expertise all depend on the narrow categories of departments that tend to work against the logics of the interesting, I’m not sure what kind of future the interdisciplinary university has. Normally, I’d say unpredictability is “interesting,” but—in my experience—higher education’s predilection for predictability has me thinking otherwise.

Breaking from Binary Invention for Belva!

For Belva, on the occasion of her birthday.

I had friends who welcomed their daughter, Belva, into the world. Baby names are a weird thing: bound up in family history, aspirational politics, and (increasingly in neo-liberal culture) individual branding. There’s a way to read Belva as a deviation from the terribly popular Bella iteration of Isabella. Bella is off-the-charts popular because of the Twilight series, which makes variants like Belva a useful alternative. It beckons to the other Bellas in her future classrooms while having plausible deniability that her parents were Twilight fans.

But I like Belva for other reasons (that have only a little to do with my fondness for her parents).  Belva peaked in popularity in the 1880s (and by peaked, I mean, it’s highest point was when we started tracking things like baby-name popularity. That this tracking coincides with the height of industrialization, urbanization, and consumer capital shouldn’t come as a surprise. But even at its most popular, Belva seems to have barely broken into the top 400 names. So what does this data tell us, as we contemplate little Belva of the 21^st century? It tells us that her parents have tapped into a recognizable but still rare signifier from the American Victorian Era. And that’s why baby names are awesome.

Belva is a chance to learn something about our past, to indicate (however subconsciously or accidentally) a willingness to connect our future with a previous aesthetic. And Ranciere notes that aesthetics (secondarily, in the aesthetics of the name, I suppose) indicate the conditions of belonging. So to what historical trajectory does Belva belong? The trajectory of Belva AnnLockwood, a proponent of coeducation at a time when that wasn’t the norm. That Belva also got a law degree, though only after being refused entry to one school (she’d be a distraction to the men, apparently) and completing coursework at another. She only received her law degree after she wrote to President Grant to lean on the school to grant the diploma. Not surprisingly, Belva Lockwood went on to use her education and legal experience to petition for equal rights, equal pay, and women’s suffrage. She was the first woman to argue before the U.S. Supreme court (and so Belva’s arrival in the wake of important court decisions has a kind of cosmic synergy…if you’re into that thing). Lockwood managed to secure $5 million for the Cherokee people, because it turned out the U.S. Government owed it. Like many suffragettes of her time, Lockwood was a prohibitionist, which isn’t exactly a policy my friends support (but don’t we all want our children to follow in the footsteps of prohibitionists, for at least a little while?).

I wouldn’t have learned anything about Belva Lockwood, were it not for little Belva of the 21^st century. And here’s to hoping the new Belva has the tenacity and conviction of Belva Lockwood of the 19^th century…because as it happens, Lockwood’s work is clearly not quite finished. But anyway, thanks Belva of the 21st Century. You've been here for 8 hours and already I'm a better person because of you.

Resonant Isocrates

David Beard, the syntax factory himself, recently directed readers of the blogora to a really tidy blog entry by Tania Smith at Edu*Rhetor on the utility of reading Isocrates as part of an Organizational Communication course.

Smith notes that Isocrates is invaluable, not only because of his commitment to a rhetoric of ethical engagement, but also because his model of rhetorical education closely resembles what many imagine when they think of the liberal arts. While Smith notes that Isocrates connects to these contemporary dynamics of pedagogy, it remains less clear how we might get contemporary students to connect to Isocrates.

As part of my continuing experiments with packaging the rhetorical tradition in the trappings of digital life, I'll be working on this project in the coming months:

I imagine "rhetorix comix" as pdf formatted comic books (with interactive links, maybe?) that package things like "Against the Sophists" for use in the undergraduate classroom. The project is severely limited by my own meager abilities at digital imaging (more on why that might not be a terrible thing in a coming entry), but I think Isocrates might be the best place to ease into this mode of presentation. First, as Smith notes, Isocrates is terribly relevent in many contemporary contexts. Second, his works are generally short essays and orations that lend themselves well to the abbreviated style of the comic-book frame. Maybe someday we'll get the illustrated Quintillian, but for now I'm hoping to churn out a short exercise in anachronism: Isocrates Against the Sophists.

Prosopopoeia, Twitter, and Puppets

So here's the rudimentary video presentation I did for UND's Working Group in Digital and New Media event. We called the event "Digital Lightning" and the purpose was to demonstrate a variety of approaches to digital scholarship in quick bursts that prompted the audience to ask questions.

To drive home the point about voice, I stood behind a podium beneath the screen with the puppet above.  The puppet did all the fake talking.  You can't quite make it out, but you can see it (and the whole slate of presentations) here.

Loss Leaders and Leading Losers

As Black Friday descends upon the American buyosphere (to borrow from Thomas Hine), it offers an opportunity to consider the civic, cultural, and maybe (though not likely) spiritual obligations in light of consumerism. What follows is a tweak of the Holiday episode of Communication 404: Advertising and Society, and an effort to give shape to a notion of consumer culture that does not neglect its civic responsibilities nor insist on exorcising the structures of liberal capital.

In COMM 404, we read Twitchell’s essay on Santa andCoca-Cola along side Thomas Hine’s chapter on Christmas shopping in I Want That! And the chapter on American Girl Dolls from Trading Up. Triangulating these three texts necessitates considering how the Holiday season develops as a palatable excuse to embed a culture of consumption that both bolsters the economy at a crucial time (December is cold and dark and nobody wants to go walk the storefronts, and also, end of the fiscal year for a lot of businesses) and trains individuals (particularly the kiddos) to engage in the marketplace in discerning ways. The punchline of Hine (and of the Holiday episode of 404) is that if Christmas did not exist (and as the communal and familial event, it did not prior to the late 19^th century) then the market would have to create it (and so it did).

Given this conclusion, Twitchell’s reading about Santa Claus and Coca-Cola as the syncretization of competing or seemingly unrelated logics becomes useful to us, in that much as we see Coke imbricating the holiday with icy cold refreshment (when, baby, it’s cold outside) we also have to see the unpalatable hyper-consumption of Black Friday as part of a broader logic of consumption that is necessary from a macro-economic perspective. Jobs, tax revenue, etc., are markedly improved by the year-end excuse to over-consume.

All this is to say that grousing about consumerism on Black Friday is unpalatable to me. Unpalatable in the first case because of the social training the holiday season performs for consumers. Children (ought to) learn discerning consumer behavior by tailoring lists and by negotiating their expectations relative to social capital (naughty or nice?). All of this productive socializing work can be undone by hyperactive approaches to the market (if we didn’t learn to balance our Holiday approach as children, we might enact a cycle of over-over-indulgence) or done elsewhere by other authorized structures (not celebrating Christmas certainly doesn’t preclude one from becoming a consumer).

I take gripes about an overly commercial Christmas to be unpalatable in the second sense as a historically misinformed and ascetic obverse to the season’s lessons of indulgence. If Christmas is the time when kids can flip the script on their parents and be as willfully desirous as their behavior merits, then it seems Christmas also becomes the one time of the year when people complain about the evils of capital as if it wipes the slate clean on the other 11 months of consumer behavior. More to the point, I’d argue you can chart an increase in the rise of anti-consumer rants about the Holidays directly to a rise in consumption driven economics that span the year. Why step up the consumerism in December if we’re engaging the marketplace full-tilt regardless of the calendar?

But despite my desire to treat the marketplace as useful and socializing institution in contemporary life, there are surely parts of the Holiday marketplace that are unavoidably cynical. While a great sale serves as an instance of community building for Hine, Black Friday will likely indicate a different kind of community: assault by the invisible (and visible) hands of self-interested shoppers. And so we get to the point of the title. We can answer the question “why do we shop now?” at the macro-level as I’ve tried above, or at the micro-level by noting that many shop at unseemly hours of late November because the deals are inviting. These deals, extremely limited but also extremely rewarding, are called “loss leaders” by the retail industry, meaning the shops take losses on those deals in an effort to get shoppers to commit the remainder of their budget to other products in the store.

In this way, loss leaders are a miniature moment of access to a category of product that would otherwise fall beyond the budgets of shoppers, much as early Christmas celebrations (before the mass-consumer iteration) served as moments of reversing the relationship between feudal lords and serfs. In those times, Hine tells us, the landed aristocracy would provide gifts to the workers and servants, providing them access to a class of products that fell beyond their means and station the other 11 months of the year. If we think of loss leaders via the tokenism of class-based gifting, then we can see that loss leaders indicate which way the losers in a given society are being led. And so loss leaders offer us a way of thinking through our relationship to the marketplace that is less about questions of why and when we consume and more about questions of what and where (in terms of locale and status) we consume.

As such, a responsible mechanism of consuming is no longer a function of whether we engage the market in the 12^th month or not (since engaging the market does a great deal of social work and since not engaging the market would therefore have dire social—as well as macroeconomic—consequences). Instead, we can consider or responsibilities to the market alongside our responsibility to leadership, loss, and the broader consequences of purchases. Small Business Saturday (an initiative set up by American Express, which certainly complicates matters) offers a corrective to Black Friday, not so much as an alternative time (I’ll skip Friday and spend my wares Saturday) but as an alternative logic of engaging the marketplace. Seen as that kind of alternative, it might also inform how we engage the marketplace on Black Friday, less a condition of loss leaders and more a condition of taking leadership in how we articulate what constitutes a win and a loss as we participate in the marketplace.