Entry 9

          I think Wysocki’s Introduction to “Into Between—On Composition in Mediation” is largely encouraging us to think of writing and our expressiveness, thinking, and ideologies produced by writing as a system that includes our bodies and is enacted upon our bodies, and not an intangible, conceptual, abstract process—similar to the arguments that have been made throughout the semester of technology being material, not just a theoretical cyberspace that exists somewhere beyond the hardware and software we use. The heart of her argument seems to be, “…a tension  between the felt experiences of an interior—being a body that composes, writes, and communicates—and a bodily exterior, of being one person among many, subject to study and impress from above or outside, mattering only because of one’s part in composing the many” (10). “That is, in understanding that we are (to use Wegenstein’s formulations) each a subject—a body perceived through itself, through its own mediations—at the same time we are each also objectified through others’ mediations of us…mass media, while potentially setting up structures that could change our relations with a stultifying past, instead have been set up to deny subjects their own perceptions and any abilities to produce their own media and mediations based on those perceptions” (16).

            Wysocki stresses that we are both a body producing ideas within ourselves, as well as a body with ideas projected upon ourselves by others. I think this is important not only in considering new media and technology, but in the misunderstandings and failed good intentions that come out of those media. While the presence of our physical bodies may not be apparent in cyberspace, the ideas of default cultural characteristics that are associated with race are still projected into cyberspace, and thus bring race and racism into non-physical, non-bodied spaces.

            I think this is the key transition to Banks’s piece, “Oakland, The Word, and the Divide: How We All Missed the Moment”. Here, the focus is very much the implications of race in use and access to technology, and how the institutionalization of racism is carried into the institutionalization of technology under a global capitalist market. The idea of embodiment recurs through the piece, and the projection of values (largely racial values) onto Black bodies, as well as the denial or cover-up attempts regarding the presence or absence of Black bodies in proximity to technology, as is clearly stressed in the “Falling Through the Net” reports and the Bush Administration’s denial of the Digital Divide as a social phenomenon. Banks also points out how technology use operates under the assumption of White As Default (p. 34), which immediately instills a racial value in the “cybersphere”, as well as creating an absent Platonic-esque Ideal of the Web user, embodying certain cultural collectives of race/class/gender while denying others (mainly minority/poor/female).

            Overall, this articles attempt to open our eyes both to who we physically are as writers, how our writing is perceived when embodied, and which bodies are participating in which areas. I think these are incredibly important for discussions of technology, which often make the assumption of universal accessibility or neutrality, rather than acknowledging that conversations (through real socioeconomic facts and through embodiment) are actually revolving around certain demographics and access points. 

Entry 8: Hooray Art History

            First off, let me start by saying that I’m getting a little tired of the puns.

            Now that that’s out of my system, I think that O’Gorman used Chapter 3 to bring in issues of the binary (which of course he punned with computer coding) within imagetexts. He begins with the Ramist tradition and its particular situation in pedagogy. To recap, Ramus’s philosophy helped lay the groundwork for the printing press, based on his efforts to move information outside of memory and into a storage container. This shift in internal to external can be documented in the learning flashcards that O’Gorman includes, which rely on subjective mnemonic devices. Under the Ramist tradition, these cards have to be remediated to bring that knowledge outside of the personal and the memory, and into what eventually becomes the textbook, the tool of the Republic of Scholars. As a non-academic side note, his characterization here of the textbook and the ROS made me imagine that cliché scene of the bad guy (the ROS) spinning around, stroking a white cat in his lap (the textbook) while plotting world destruction. I’m not sure if I can explain that by a lack of sleep, a weird imagetext, or being a cat lady…I’ll hope it’s the imagetext one though.

            O’Gorman uses the imagetexts of William Blake to illustrate the problems with the Ramist tradition, and show that it can be rebelled against and possibly overcome if we adopt Blake’s methods in our contemporary pedagogy. I did enjoy the exercise he shared from his own class, where he had students remediate “Nurse’s Song”. His students comment, “It was strange that when told what something is supposed to be, everyone almost automatically adapts their perception to see it that way”(66), I found to be very telling of how we’re trained to look at images. There is the notion that there is one right way to interpret images (and, to a certain degree, I’d argue that while there aren’t advocates for reading a text one way, there is potentially a hierarchy of interpretations for specific texts, ruled by a more favored or famous reading). O’Gorman presents Blake’s work as both resisting the Ramist tradition of his day, as well as offering us methods of resistance for its legacy in the academy and culture at large. Primarily, the resistance of seeing things in polar terms (as Blake does maintain certain binaries, such as good and evil) serves Blake’s imagetexts, while complicating the binary by making them inescapably bound to one another. O’Gorman writes, “Contraries may oppose one another, but they are not to be separated or divided into immutable categories or heading as in, for example, the Ramist dichotomization of knowledge” (62). Ultimately, this serves Blake’s purposes, “involv[ing] a unification of form and content, material production and ideology” (62).

            In this chapter we also, finally, get a (somewhat) clear definition of a hypericonomy. To be honest, I’ve been a little frustrated with O’Gorman’s refusal to give us a definition until this point (and a somewhat shabby one here, at least for me), as it’s made it very difficult to conceptualize any framework of a hypericonomy for me. It’s kind of sounded like “It can be anything!” to me at this point. However, when I read this: “…the process of subject formation in a culture saturated with endlessly repeated broadcast images. Those who engage in hypericonomy are asked to take a more critical look at that mode of subject formation, and have the opportunity to short-circuit it by producing and broadcasting their own schematic set of icons—not for the sake of marketing and sales, however, but for the sake of education” (68-69), I thought this:

            Memes play with images, jokes, and cultural artifacts and make commentary on them, not to replicate images for mass marketing or sales, but to spread (hopefully witty) ideas, thoughts, and observations through these images. One you log enough hours on Memebase, you’ll understand the implied tone/joke/point of the image, and the text will then make sense. And then you’ll cringe later when you see something in real life and think of how you’d meme-ify it. Maybe I totally missed the point of O’Gorman’s attempt at defining hypericonomy here and instead betrayed my own time log on Memebase by bringing this up (I made the front page once!!!!!!!!), but I think this might work. After all, he does say he wants us to take off with the idea of the hypericonomy, so I’m going to run with this for now.

            As for areas where I take issue with O’Gorman, one is in the presentation of etching. While I think the metaphorical value of Blake’s process of the materiality of his etching process matching the ideology of his philosophy and pedagogical beliefs is important and powerful, I think O’Gorman missed what I see as an important bridge between the technology and materiality of etching and his stance on the Republic of Scholars. Etching was developed at the end of the 15^th century, and was used by a range of artists, including Rembrandt and Durer. This technology marks a significant turn in how art is distributed throughout Europe. Most art produced before this point is more akin to how we think of “high art” (canvas painting and sculpture), and because of the materiality required, was usually commissioned by the Church as objects of religious devotion. The Reformation challenged iconography at the same time etching was developed, but nevertheless, a lot of prints depicted religious scenes or teachings. The biggest difference emerges out of the ability to distribute these prints. Because artists could produce one art image and then reproduce it without devoting the original amount of time needed over and over again, art becomes largely accessible to the middle class, rather than either the institution of the Church or the upper-class with the money for patronage (read in O’Gorman terms: The Republic of Scholars). I think that this is an extremely important consideration that needs to be made when evaluating the tradition against replication that Blake (and I think O’Gorman as well) advocate. While the artist’s touch is important, and I understand the resistance to mechanization, I think that the relevance of etching as a shift in cultural proliferation and access to art needs to be considered as a way to challenge the monopoly of the Republic of Scholars. After all, if you bring artist’s images into the home, then you can then think about the meanings of the images on your own terms, in your own private spaces, and either not have to visit "The Institution" to access them, or hear about the art owned and housed by the ROS and reported by them to lower classes.

            I’d like to return to the remediation of Blake’s “Nurse’s Song” as something I really agreed with and enjoyed in this chapter. O’Gorman examines how titles and text project the content we search for in an image. I think this is even more powerfully seen in modern and abstract art. It made one particular work come to mind for me, “Two Children Are Threatened by a Nightingale” by Max Ernst:

The title of this piece comes from the writing at the bottom of the frame (written in French). This dates to 1924 and is a Dada piece, although I think it’s significant that Surrealism was also “founded” this year (Surrealism, perhaps even more so than Dada, in my opinion, has weird and fascinating interaction between image and text, as O’Gorman describes). In this picture, the text is literally on the image, and works to complicate this piece in frustrating and beautiful ways. The first thing one might notice is the background of this piece: It is simultaneously a pastoral scene and one evoking the antiquity of Rome, with the arch d’triumphe and the Greco-Roman dome silhoutte. However, the subjects in this piece shouldn’t belong in either of these “genres” of painting. The girl on the left is running with a knife, possibly defending herself from or attempting to scare off the nightingale overhead. The other figure has collapsed into a fetal-esque position, but seems distorted and too limp even for a collapsed human. There is a man hunched atop the barn, carrying what appears to be a third child (but Ernst only mentions two, so which figure is really the third?) and reaching for the doorknob that is attached to the picture frame. I think this work epitomizes this complication and opposition between text and image in an imagetext that O’Gorman describes not just in this chapter, but in 1 and 2 as well. How is a nightingale threatening? Who are the two children? What is the man on the barn doing? Why is the figure so distorted and possibly dead? What is the purpose of Classical and Pastoral imagery in the background? The suggestion that Ernst has provided may reference some of the images that a viewer can locate in the piece, but by no means does it explain the piece. However, our inclination is to try to view the piece in the terms he provides, so we impose a relationship between characters that may not have existed without that suggestion—for instance, without the mention of the threatening nightingale, the bird’s silhouette may have just faded into the background as part of the Pastoral scene, as the frame is oddly dominated by the sky.

            I think this piece is perhaps a better examination and example of O’Gorman’s point here. I found that his art references in the piece were a bit lacking (for someone who resents the Republic of Scholars, he uses a lot of terms and name drops that can’t really be understood unless you’ve had some art initiation from the Republic of Scholars, an opposition I find odd), so I hope that this either interests or helps explain this to anyone who isn’t an art nerd and didn’t get some of his references to art.

            Overall, I’m enjoying the integration of art into text (obviously), but feel a bit lost in other areas of O’Gorman’s text. I recall him resisting a linear, traditional layout for his ideas in the book, though, so hopefully as I move further into it, it will become clearer and clearer.  

Entry 7

            The main theme I found in the readings for this week was how the “traditional” (or what the New London Group called “mere literacies”) composition structure limits students’ ability to express themselves through the modes and media they may have the best self-awareness over. Whether it be the visual or the aural, if a student can best express their ideas through conventions other than alphabetic text, then it is most helpful for learning if they can express themselves this way—then, perhaps, they may be able to articulate it more fully in alphabetic text to others, once they come to understand it through the mode that intuitively feels most “right” to them. This also brought up the monopoly of alphabetic text as expression (especially when Selfe describes aural vs. alphabetic cultures) and thus the only path to meaning making.

            In terms of multimodality, this week’s reading actually really helped me see the power it can communicate. I could abstractly understand how it forces students to reevaluate their thinking and expressive choices in ways that writing doesn’t, but I had yet to be moved by a multimodal piece the way I have been moved by writing—although, WSU is the first exposure I’ve had to the concept of multimodality, and before my remediated timeline, the only other projects I’ve done for WSU included drawings, which didn’t really help me express my ideas any better (or effectively) than my words can. When I first read about Selfe’s student Norris’s “Literacy=Identity: Can You See Me?” and the bell ringing and roll call being read, I could see multimodality serving to show a performance piece which highlights identity performance and resistance. Then, seeing in George’s piece the ways her students interpreted mapping colonialism, especially Deirdre Johns’s flag, I had a very powerful reaction. To me, this poetry performance and art work served as a way for me to “get” multimodality, if you will—the same way poetry and art moves me, a non-alphabetic student text can too. Perhaps this makes me sound a bit glib that I haven’t really gotten that so far, but it did really hit me this week how multimodality can be truly effective and not simply alternative or outside-the-box (as I felt when trying to draw cartoons). It made me start thinking about how I could incorporate multimodality into a classroom, especially in relation to visual and aural inundation that students today experience.

            I found the Selfe-Hesse argument to be most interesting not necessarily in what it is our jobs to do for students (to be honest, I feel like I’m seeing this every week in just about every class that approaches pedagogy), but in Selfe’s history of aural and alphabetic cultures. When she writes, “From one perspective, this process can be understood as a kind of cultural and intellectual remediation” (626), I found it to be an absolutely fascinating take on cultural artifacts in composition classrooms, especially when I then reconsidered it in light of the colonialism projects George had her students do.

            I enjoyed the George article the most this week, especially when she quotes Kehl in pointing out that some students are visually, but not necessarily verbally, sensitive (21). This made a great argument for multimodality, in my opinion. If critical thinking is the link between defining what English departments do, and students are better able to move into that critical thinking in a visual rather than verbal medium, then it makes sense to me if we have them work through it visually so that they are more comfortable inhabiting those ideas and get to know them in more detail and more self-awareness, and then make the move to having them put those thoughts, feelings, and reaction on paper.

            Yancey’s article was a bit harder for me to get into because I felt a bit ADD jumping all over the page between marginal notes, pictures, and the text (maybe that means I’m close-minded? Or maybe I shouldn’t have tried to read it before bed?), but I liked her notion that students are writing outside of the classroom, and that this isn’t unique to our generation (I hear a lot about how today’s writers write more than anyone else, and it makes me curious about the criteria they’re including for this comparison). Yancey writes, “Today, we are witnessing a parallel creation, that of a writing public made plural, and in the case of the development of a reading public, it’s taking place largely outside of school—and this in an age of universal education. Moreover, unlike what happens in our classes, no one is forcing this public to write” (300). I thought this worked really well at taking writing outside of the classroom effectively, but one thing I think could have been integrated into this article was a clear focus on how we need to teach students voice in order to work with this public, plural writing. While many people in this country are using email daily, I don’t think that means that students know how to write an email well. I’ve seen plenty of awful emails that, even though they’re writing, they need help in doing it effectively and appropriately. I would have liked to hear how Yancey could incorporate her ideas into the necessity of still needing to be understood, or achieve a certain tone, in writing that isn’t necessarily inherent to the task of writing.

            Overall, these articles were very interesting to me, especially the ones that approached multimodality in different expressive ways than I imagined it being, and the cultural implications of alphabetic texts. 

Entry 6

           I think Jody Shipka’s “Toward a Composition Made Whole” (2011) and The New London Group’s “A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies: Designing Social Futures: Designing Social Futures” (1996) have a remarkable amount in common, given that they were published fifteen years apart. Specifically, having recently been introduced to the subject and importance of multimodality, I’m somewhat surprised and confused by the fact that, even though the concept of multimodality has been around for quite some time now (especially with how quickly academic work seems to become dated), scholars are still having to justify its role in the classroom, even to their colleagues in English departments.

Specifically, I think that both of these pieces make arguments for the role of agency in multimodality: For Shipka, a multimodal project can’t be complete or relevant unless students take responsibility over their choices and decisions in the composition process. This connects to many of the texts we have read so far, especially Selfe’s urgency for students to have a critical engagement and awareness of the decisions they make in utilizing technology.

            The New London Group strongly advocates for this level of student involvement as well, making students Designers, a concept I think fits in well with Shipka’s stance on multimodal composition—the strongest connection between the two texts I find is when the New London Group writes, “Furthermore, the primary purpose of metalanguage should be to identify and explain differences between texts, and relate these to the contexts of culture and situation in which they seem to work” (17). I think that the metalanguage argued for in this article could mirror very well the conscious endeavor Shipka advocates for in multimodal composition, especially when it is considered in the “larger context” (for the New London Group, this would occur on the globalized level, for Shipka, I think it would occur in the larger world outside the classroom that students have to engage with in order to make their work relevant for the classroom).

            I think both of these texts are interesting to consider in relation to my timeline as well. I investigated the interaction between remediated technologies entering the space available in the classroom, and how the spaces are further remediated because of the presence of technology (I feel like I need the Xzibit meme as a visual aid on this…). As televisions, computers, cell phones, and the newest gadgets enter the classroom, the relationship between student and teacher changes, and therefore the pedagogy must change with it. The New London Group and Shipka’s work combined seem to address this point, with Shipka investigating more the presence and role of technology in pedagogy, and the New London Group investigating more how to update pedagogy to fit this ever-expansive world and the various cultures (access included) that students bring into the classroom through experience and practice.

            Overall, both of these texts engage very effectively for me with the overall questions we have brought up this semester, as well as the issues of multimodality and how technology should be integrated into the English classroom.