Author: Sean Eve
The Problem of Context
Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, YouTube: these are not simply among the dominant expressive outlets of our culture, they represent communicative technologies that have superseded traditional media as the principal means through which language itself, and particularly English, is transformed. It is not that the book, and its varied novelistic, non-fictional, and poetic iterations, including its popular and serialized correlatives – the magazine, the newscast, the academic journal – are without ongoing influence. Digital equivalents make them an important part of an evolving landscape. Still, much as they remain influential, they are being wrenched from their dominant positions as both observers and active participants in the vanguard of the culture, replaced by increasingly democratized forms of social cultural production and change that demand new strategies from educators, if we are to engage the accelerating transformations within contemporary written English.
The nineteenth and twentieth centuries have offered us anticipations of the current situation, presenting us with a range of new media that could be employed directly or appropriated as artistic device and intellectual instrument into existing forms in an accelerating manner. Writers have been responding to the pace of technological change in terms of representation in ways that we have come to recognize in poetry and prose of all kinds, for as long as written text has been a cultural force. We may feel prepared for technological and material cultural transformations on the basis of those precedents. The formal and intellectual dialogics of modernity, however, in its many guises and across centuries of history, look from the vantage point of the present qualitatively different than the shifts we are experiencing now.
The bureaucracies that managed and generalized textual responses in the past, the limited number of subjectivities one engaged, and the dominance of particular concepts and their impacts on language, though residually manifest today, have been largely supplanted by forms of written and visual communication that operate in real-time and within a dizzying array of atomized communities. Add to this a further narrowing of the distinctions between private and public communication, and ongoing transformations in cognitive behavior as a result of our virtually permanent interconnectedness, and one could be excused for wondering how any amount of training could prepare an instructor to navigate the conditions of developing form or transformations within collective and individual subjectivities in ways that might be meaningfully prescriptive. Particularly for educators working with students early in their university careers, where disciplinary vocabularies and practices are not yet a part of a student’s self-selected educational path, the imposition of our own educational experiences and expectations can be self-defeating.
It isn’t simply that things have speeded up, or that reading’s interconnections with experience have changed. The very conditions of production and its personal, social, and economic consequences are so fundamentally decentered at this point, and so open to meaningful contributions from every segment of society, that the object itself is losing both cohesion and relevance. The idea that one can identify a consensus of purpose, or that educator can look to conventions of expectation within the academy itself for direction, is as naïve as the presumption that apprenticeship is still the best available model to enable an individual’s ultimate self-fulfillment. Even as experiential learning, internships, and extra-institutional dimensions are becoming fundamental to post-secondary education, we are still struggling with both the objective of text-based courses, and the role the student, as subject, should play within our existing rubrics.
Broadening the forms of text available for students to analyze isn’t enough, particularly if the forms of documentation we then permit the students to use in response are defined as primarily descriptive and analytical. We can attribute value to an object on the basis of its historical legitimacy, carving out whatever radical hermeneutics we wish, but insofar as these values are already placed against a broad range of textual and formal conventions and possibilities (an emerging multi-media explosion that constitutes the echoing response of our culture to any impactful phenomenon or information) this attempt at greater inclusion of cultural phenomenon within our consideration (the democratizing of history’s informative texts to include material culture for example, or the inclusion of an increasing range of varied and contradictory voices within the conversation) only serves to highlight the inadequacy of conventional ways of incorporating these contributions in the ultimate formulations students are themselves asked to create in response to what they are considering.
If we can’t expect to model student experience on our own educations, and if the book, in particular, and the personal relationships it depended upon and afforded, its intimacies, are not simply unfamiliar to our students, but for most of them, deeply counter-intuitive, then how are we supposed to articulate a space of meaningful relation, whatever texts we are considering, that will work in the current landscape? For our premises as educators are at least as premised on the specific phenomenological and ontological conditions of our own experiences of insight, as they are on any observations we might make of emergent conditions of meaning.
I am speaking for myself here: as someone who grew up with books and with a dissemination of knowledge built around the discrete possibilities afforded by reading; as someone who may have had a healthy skepticism when it came to the efficacy of textual intervention, but who nonetheless embraced the necessities of informing oneself through certain types of reading, and therefore accepted the existential pre-determinants of such a process. I am old enough to remember things before widespread digitization, a perspective that no doubt hampers me in some ways from fully comprehending the specifics of the changes occurring around me, but has the advantage of making my own training and experience useful indicators when considering the origins of at least a few of the pedagogic problems we face.
As with any institution, the academy, and education more generally, are subject to existing habits, internalizations of historical reality, a fondness for traditions. We each of us depend on our memories. Culture itself, particularly its self-descriptive epiphenomena, and education is surely among these, is predisposed to a recognitive lag. This is something the book, the story, the article embodies, part of their on-going attractiveness to many within our society. The canonical, not simply as reactionary but prerequisite, and this is no less true in the language of the sciences than it is in the humanities, has been and remains both the domain and justification for many an educational choice, even as convention is set up as a straw man from which the contemporary breaks free, a rupture which is itself ironically the very stuff out of which we craft our intellectual histories. In that sense we are all involved in double game, both characterizing and perhaps strategically mis-characterizing convention, so as to illustrate more fully the conditions of difference that constitute genuine insight. We enact mistakes or at least limitations in retrospect so as to arrive at the horizon of present boundaries.
In some sense this document is built in just that way. It seeks to synthesize, to assemble in a series of moves consistent with a premise. It postulates an existing present that is already out of date, something for which I apologize to all those educators who feel unrecognized or implicitly criticized here. For I know that we are each of us doing what we can to reconcile values and objectives that have legitimate advocates and that pull us in ever more irreconcilable directions. This writing argues with and within itself, a hallowed process of internalizing conflict, fundamental to our rhetoric and to the origins of the social sciences, has undoubted benefits, personal ones as well as intellectual. But as with changes in form, these seemingly universally productive internal dynamics are themselves being altered by shifts in the culture across traditional and new digital media, and by the relations a new generation has to the conditions of acquisition of information and the determinacies of meaning. Coming to a generally relevant conclusion remains perhaps a nominal objective, albeit an increasingly illusive one. The notion of an overarching truth, however, of a subliminal structure or fresh vocabulary that can resolve such contradictions assumes a model of individuation that transcends partisanship, is counter-strategic. It is at its core an old humanistic ruse. The emotional and spiritual gratifications implicit to the dialectic must be accepted as a sufficiently attractive outcome to justify temporary alienation and personal sacrifice. The trouble is, we don’t live in that sort of world anymore.
The knowledgeable decry as they always have, the reductionism and outright falseness of political discourse, of misappropriated research, of inconsistent conclusions, but our society as a material body is abandoning the dialogical as a means to achieve coherence, replacing sense with sensation, relativism with implicit positionality. A consequence of both the bankruptcy of spiritual justifications themselves in light of global history and the re-emergence of existential justifications for conflict, this shift should not simply be brushed aside, chalked up to economic or political considerations that are beneath our respect. Nor should we presume that these shifts are destined to be overcome by the inevitable superiority of legitimate understanding, as defined by explication. In ways that we as teachers of thinking and writing cannot simply ignore or seek to postpone through humiliation, the perceived failures of institutions and self-evident ideological mastery of dominant modes of information have engendered not simply a generation of skeptics, but a communicative technology that resists conclusion, or understands it as practically but not conceptually justifiable. We are, in fact, facing a time when conclusion itself is perceived as failure, where resolution is acquiescence to defeat.
An effective object engenders proliferation, after all, the canonical timeline now mirrored in a plethora of real-world, real time reactions, responses and reformulations. And the students are astute enough to recognize in the inchoate elements of the famous objects they consider, not only their essential currency, but political expedience. The students want to jump in, to have their work participate in a larger dialogue, to breach the public/private divide that sets the academy apart from the world. They have been writing in public or semi-public ways for much of their lives, something that sets them apart from earlier generations. They are also acutely aware, however, of the price they may pay for exposing themselves, the very real costs of visibility. Experience with commentary threads, the authoritarianism of the current political environment, these work together to preclude any conclusion which is not innocuously banal or safely within the existing ideological boundaries of a given binary. So when conclusion is insisted upon, in all but the most confident or determined of cases, the result is likely to be disappointing. We can argue for the personal benefits of rigorous analysis, but the pleasures of synthesis that provided for many in a previous generation a sense of both agency and embodiment, may offer far less promise for a group confronting an endless sequence of determinacies they seek to forestall rather embrace. If the future looks grim, the word conclusion itself takes on darker meanings. The promises and practices, which for so many educators, served to help them realize themselves and their goals, are not just outmoded for the vast majority of our students, they are anathema. Times change, and with it the spirit that informs those times. It is not just the digital that is informing these shifts in students needs and behaviors, but the world spawned by its digital correlative.
“So You Like to Take Pictures”
What do we do then, as educators, when we are pulled between a sense of historical responsibility and experiential definitions of thoughtful consideration, even as evolving conditions of language and self-expression look nothing like the forms of making sense that we ourselves may seek to inculcate in others? And how do we revivify the perceived utility of limited conclusion in an environment where the proliferation of argument and the infinite thread of the search engine seems as essential as the oxygen we breathe?
For one thing, we can begin to embrace the utility, indeed the prerequisite nature of the image as a dominant component of contemporary self-expression. While language can certainly encompass much of what image characterizes, it lacks the image’s material immediacy. This is not inconsequential from an epistemological standpoint. Image also has the advantage of suggesting by its very nature. It is concrete, but open ended. It conflates the personal and the representational, the social and the self-reflexive. Image, for many, is also subject to less educationally specific parameters of evaluation. Like the informal language our students often have recourse to, it gestures to the outside while being nominally subjective. It is also a novel place for many of the students as an instance of academic formulation. They can using existing skills and sensibilities, employing a communication device central to their social behaviors with peers, while experimenting with its possibilities as a bridge between those spaces and the communicative environs of education. As such, the use of images, particularly along with text, affords students a chance to test sophistications much of their prior education has not been able to accommodate. Developmentally, it offers a useful way to link shifts in social and institutional expectations.
My work involves undergraduates, a group navigating many of the thresholds of adulthood. Employing peer communication strategies and forms is particularly valuable at this stage, as family, community, and educational standards are all subject to reevaluation as an intrinsic part of the students’ emerging experiences away from home. Including some of the characteristics associated with students’ social media experience builds on already widely used strategy in writing education, employing the personal. We have tried, and continue to employ, the personal and its immediate experiential insights as a remedy to both institutional skepticism and ideological presumption among the digitally native. Books may be anathema, but surely the daily acts of observation and reflection we live with have a continued relevance. At least among my contemporaries in writing education this seems to have been a popular strategy. Internalization, defined not just textually but in immediate recognitive terms, gives the book a place to prosper and develop within each of us. We may not read as many books, but we can become a book, or at least aspire to define ourselves through our stories and technical vocabularies in ways that afford a coherence we don’t see reflected in the objectives or objects we deign to share. The object may have been abandoned, but the objective we imagine can be kept intact. Strange, when inconsistency and the express variety of conditions of self-expression are the very hallmarks of a modern understanding of self.
This is where image proves so useful, not the ironic selfie, though this is part of what animates an understanding of image as text, but rather images of others, of the physical world, of a disjointed series of moments in time, space and observation that are unified through narration and memory, reconstituted as action in much the way the mechanics of film operates, and reified as cultural objects in their own right, even as they remain anecdotal, a distinct form of photography that my students employ as the most legitimate way to embody the real. There is an aesthetic here, both in photography and in text. And it is in the particularity of these choices that we have the best opportunity to get students to identify both a personal philosophy and a possibly useful relation to the world around them.
My students hate explication, transitioning; they mistrust the semblance of agreement. They prefer things to remain associative, because association is both pragmatically and materially the environment into which they communicate. It is also the recognitive consequence they seek from those communications. They are on the look-out for those who identify in what they share what they themselves tacitly acknowledge, a strategy as much a consequence of contemporary authoritarianism as it is a celebration of skeptical integrity. The social and the intellectual intersect here, politics, as always, deeply local.
They want friends, professional advocates, a community that coheres, rather than seeking a totalizing coherence in their own positions. They gesture towards kindredness in thought, as it relates to experience, by grounding their communications in the visual context of physical circumstance, the seemingly direct reportage of facebook or instagram providing the semblance of a shared world. At the same time, however, both through the particularities of these visual texts ( the complex relation of form to content), and in the space between the material self-evidence of the image and the linguistic dynamics of citation, they open up a space for speculation afforded by dissonance, by dissociation, by what remains between the image and its caption that can only be bridged by particulars of knowledge and sensibility that would be both vulgar and self-defeating to say out loud.
Remember, they want friends. And what binds the reader and writer more firmly than conspiracy? The world may be stupid, but we know better, they intimate.
This focus on the tacit becomes even more pressing in a digital context, as the students are working towards the nuances afforded by the speech-act in the new communicative platforms that are displacing conversation. That’s why irony and radical economy are so intrinsic to contemporary communicative aesthetics. The public and private rest in very different places than they did for a prior generation, embodiment predicated on a series of sustained self-characterizing descriptive spaces: the post; forwarding; the crafting of alternate, aspirational realities, all in sequence but pointedly inconsistent, a poetics that both gestures to the known and familiar within physical circumstance and posits their emotional distance within those particular experiences. Their poetry may evolve out of a combination of visual and linguistic texts, but that does not stop the majority of my students making beautiful sentences. They are more attentive to the possibilities of formalism than we might presume given the lack of attention most of them give to literature. Discourse on the other hand, at least in its normative and, to their minds, hyper-extended instances, is little more than situational or tribalistic babbling. They resist explanation. They abhor the repetitive except as device. They dislike above all the language of explication.
The singular must remain tacit, not just because being explicit comes with personal or professional risk, but because it embodies a failure in the poetics of written communication as they have come to recognize it. Being explicit precludes the pleasure of interpretive connection and plasticity; it turns words into work, makes experience utilitarian, defines story in terms of insight. It makes them foolish in their own eyes, in other words. It’s embarrassing.
Socially and informationally, the idea of explaining everything is simply a nonstarter. With information coming at them in diverse forms, many of them visual, and with multiple windows, screens, and subjects crowding for their attention, it shouldn’t surprise us that economy, discontinuity, and implicit layering are our students’ current prefered intellectual practices. Economy is becoming even more important , and with it density, given the limited space afforded by the cellphone screen.
Googling has externalized and also depersonalized many of the synthetic processes a previous generation of writers and thinkers could easily presume to be both intrinsic and fundamental. Such a change is also happening in the disciplines, is it not? Mega-data increasingly replaces individual insight as the vantage point from which transformations in understanding are presumed to come, a proportional extrapolation of variation and identification of dominance taking the place of a synthetic totality. Words may be part of the mix, but the body is not constituted in the same way and from the same substances as it was previously. And information in its many guises has a relation to language that is at best suspect.
Our focus on polls is a clear example of this. Pundits of every stripe are free to extrapolate from a particular statistic whatever prejudices or prescriptions they wish to assert or confound. The residual body, in the form of the commentator is not someone who simply translates, he or she spins. And this is accepted as theatre, is recognized as such. Argument becomes ideological embodiment. The public sphere then, is recognized as a place where embodiment both mediates ideological conflict, and where the subject is torn to pieces. In an eerie echo of the pageants of Inquisition, each participant becomes both him or herself and a double. Language is the trickster here, explanation enacting the displacement. If there is a body, a living subject as opposed to an idea, then that individual is likely to end up as does the hero in Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People, dependent for his consolations on the few private relationships he has had the foresight to cultivate in advance.
I don’t wish to give the students a pass on ethics; at NYU at least many of them are in an uncannily similar economic position to their nineteenth-century counterparts, a class whose privilege hinged on their ideological acquiescence. Structurally however, both in developmental terms, and as dependents who have not yet formed stable adult communities, they lack the emotional compensating factors to take on risks that they have been shown all too clearly lead to the conflated behaviors of suicide and terrorism. Even as an audience, their express behaviors must be seen to adhere to at least one of a range of predictive reactions. They may embrace a counterculture, but this, no more or less than a more seemingly conventional identification, is seen as succumbing to co-option, as pretense, as an issue of style where the clothes are wearing the person.
Recourse to essentialist humanism is a kneejerk reaction that, while understandable, the educator would do best to resist. For this too, embedded in the narratives of resistance that are their models of history, is seen as emotionally satisfying only in the shortest of terms. What you see if you are paying attention, particularly if it is something you document, may have a desirable impact, but what you think, and your participation in the sorts of presumptive argument that pass for public discussion these days, is only destined to limit your possible efficacy. To enter argument is, in other words, to lose yourself.
The choices one makes with regard to a possible range of responses, of course, embodies much of what academic thinking and educators seek to have students identify in the situation itself. Asking them to make a choice, and a more sophisticated or at least more inclusive choice with regard to whatever they are considering, and to build a discourse with that in mind, is a large part of what we expect will come out of an educational process. But perhaps in this we are doing something analogous in the way we judge the communicational choices of our students that is akin to what we do when we critically under-evaluate our partisan rivals. We are assuming such communication should make sense to all of us, rather than to a particular, intended audience. We are, in the name of lucidity, missing the point, or rather wishing for a world that has long since gone out of fashion or never really existed. For while they may choose the other as an object of speculation, that otherness is not presumed to transcend the conditions of a particular self-identification except as an enactment of ideals. And such transcendent identification is itself seen as a kind of nostalgia by our students. Should we be surprised then when our requests for explanation, for synthesis, for the assertion of overarching truth are met with platitudes or ideological reiterations?
Educational discourse is only rarely placed within a range of communicative fields the students recognize as socially legitimate. It is simply one of any number of pseudo-embodiments they take on to manage bureaucratic relations. Their real focus, and the communities in which they value expressive possibility, are elsewhere. That is the greatest loss in this case, the development of a strategic attitude to the majority of academic writing, particularly early in their university years, that presumes it lack of relevance or utility elsewhere in life.
Okay. So Now What?
The mechanics of thinking, the material conditions of intellection, the spaces within experience which afford opportunities for written reflection are all changing, changing so as to be unrecognizable, at least by someone well into middle age like myself. Beyond technological change, the socio-politics of our current environment are sufficiently different to bring into question the sorts of public, written, self-expression we should expect from our students. My response has been to give the students I work with the opportunity to begin to define for themselves what viable research and the written characterizing of investigation should look like going forward, and to be candid about the fact that I have perhaps even less sense than they do what kind of documents and analytical processes my students will be expected to perform in the future. We are facing more than the simple multimedia augmentations found in today’s digital New York Times. Language itself, both on the local level of semantics and in the combination of choices that represent dominant forms, seems to me to be headed for extraordinary change. The fact that the morphology of English as a living language is increasingly a consequence of its use by non-native speakers and writers across the world can only accelerate that process.
The essay, like the novel, is defined by its lack of prescriptive form, its allegiance to the time of its making, and the propensities that drive its authorship. What that has meant in my case is allowing students to work out how the kinds of self-expression and thinking they already engage in with their peers on a regular basis might offer some indications of the way ahead. On the most basic level, this includes embracing the visual/verbal dialectics that come out of a combination of words and pictures that characterize social media and to recognize that both narrative and analytical strategies are likely to develop as much out of cinematic and visual precedent as they are from the writings to which they are expected to respond.
Allowing the students to use both visual and verbal texts in their initial investigations of a subject has two benefits. They are often able to be much more specific in terms of the evidence supporting/underlying their thoughts when they seek that evidence visually. The image serves as a mnemonic for a whole situation, so the implication here is not that it’s predominantly visual recognition they are drawing upon. They also use the visual to signify the world outside, the world beyond themselves, the material nature of circumstance as it complements and problematizes recognition. This has two benefits: they are permitted to include different kinds of information in its ‘original’ form and by using documentation from outside the classroom they are integrating academic discourse to other communicative practices and communities from the world outside.
Language, with its implications, cultural associations, and lack of intrinsic transparency, serves still as the express space for thought, for attitude, for personalization. But here again, I give students broad latitude as to the conditions of formulation they include. This means that they are free to play with a variety of approaches to language, with fragmentation, with appropriation of all kinds, with forms or a mix of forms that often involves drawing on writing they have already done or was shared with them elsewhere. When these are brought together, the space between all these pieces, both between the different language components and between the images and the language, becomes the space available to the students through which to develop a complex dialogue between aspirations and the given, between ideals and reality, between recognitive possibilities and the limitations of conventional understanding and formulation.
I have attached only a few beginnings to these speculative pages, a small group of works which provide my first and my student’s first attempts at identifying questions, areas of inquiry, the places where they can begin to identify their own discursive propensities. My text itself is designed to represent a starting point, a conceptual marking of origins. During the course of the academic year, I will be sharing several iterations of the student’s projects, including multiple formal investigations, the development of games as an apparatus for conceptual modeling, and finally, the ultimate objects they devise as the optimal context through which to express their evolving understandings. In some cases these may take the form of familiar creative instruments or modified analytic texts, but in other cases, what the students finally create may look more like business plans; professional external communications, like pamphlets; or even apps – real world objects that they value as much as an opportunity to explore received professional forms as they understand them as optimal contexts for self-discovery.
These choices, dependent at least in part on the students’ emerging interests in particular disciplinary approaches or professional objectives are not, I think, less appropriate than those which presume academic discourse as the ultimate conclusion of intellectual work. I offer my students that possibility also, and appreciate the diligent efforts many of my colleagues make to help the students navigate the challenges of this kind of writing. Giving them a chance to understand their work outside the conventional boundaries of the academy, however, is one of the most useful motivating tools available. The students, if anything, are asked to work much harder, to use forms such as video that they may be familiar with but have not always themselves made use of in the past, and to take on practically, in the world, and conceptually, through their own evolving vocabularies, a relation to the subject of the student’s own choosing that is largely up to them. They are often terrified by this abandonment of the given. It’s part of why I offer my students a chance to begin the process with something as comfortable to many of them as a photo essay. The goal is not just to de-familiarize the academic process, but to get them to understand the value of what they are engaged in outside the academy, to help them find the utility of their existing self-expressive and self-educating practices, and how the communities they form personally might more closely reflect than they initially imagine the communities they will form within an intellectual context.
To view related student projects, please visit the following the following post: Writing with Pictures: The role of visual text in the on-going transformation of global, written English | Student Projects