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If people are things, more or less, then we need not worry much about them; if we are teachers we need merely speak in their direction, test their recall, and so forth. The process can be almost entirely mechanical. But if they are people, watch out.

Stephen Kuusisto‘s 12/13/09 posting, “A Largely Lonely Triumph: Disability and Contemporary Higher Education,” however, exposes the cost of treating people as less than full members of the human community. Carefully picking quotations from a Helen Keller: A Life by Dorothy Herrmann, Kuusisto points to Keller’s loneliness and the awkwardness of most members of the college community in her presence. Keller herself found a metaphor for portions of the experience, saying that the instructors were as “impersonal as Victrolas” — people who had found largely mechanical means of relating to this student who they had an ethical obligation not just to educate but to treat decently and humanely.

Against what he calls an “Autocracy of the Victrola” that is commonplace in higher education today (see his list of linked examples), Kuusisto places the idea of culture: the webwork of meanings and rituals and agreements that make up civil life. He suggests that a cultural movement belonging to people with disabilities challenges the foot-dragging of academic culture, and that a better arrangement will require that the one culture be influenced by the other. He writes:

The issue of inclusion for people with disabilities in higher ed is a matter of culture: far too many colleges and universities fail to imagine that people with disabilities represent a cultural movement. (Let’s leave aside for the moment the powerful statistical urgencies represented by the finding that nearly 10 per cent of matriculating freshmen are self-identifying as having a disability.)

A cultural understanding of disability means at its very core that students or staff with disabilities are our children, our sisters, daughters, sons, fathers and mothers, our veterans, our colleagues. But it means more than that: an academic or curricular awareness of disability means that our nation’s institutions of higher learning will finally sense that what they “do” they do for all and with no oppositional and expensive and demeaning hand wringing. Such a position requires that disability services and academic culture–matters of curricular planning and cultural diversity be wedded as they should be.

With these words Kuusisto makes clear that the solution to the Autocracy of the Victrola is cultural, a process of connection and recognition and reconciliation, a process of learning akin to that required in order to be “wedded,” as he says in the closing sentence. None of us had better get married if we aren’t ready to acknowledge the experiences of others, or run colleges or stand at the front of classrooms or sign up to live in a dorm, I’d guess. None of us can contribute to the upkeep of our culture without that same skill, most likely, if culture is the webwork of meanings and rituals and agreements that make up civil life and if it is at the same time a process of connecting with and recognizing the identity of others.

Postscript. From another Kuusisto blog entry published on 12/11/09:

I say this not because blindness is a bad thing–far from it, for indeed I’ve been writing for over a decade now about the ways that blindness functions as a form of epistemology–all disabilities offer the normative world riches of mental diversity.

This is a brainstorming piece. Let’s contrast two historical events, not equal in scale or importance but, I hope, suggestive.

1. Otto and Elise Hampel were beheaded in a Nazi prison in 1943 after what was perhaps a fruitless series of protests against Hitler’s regime. Never previously involved in politics, they were moved to action by the death of Elise’s brother as a soldier early in the war. The two residents of Berlin, perhaps unable to find any other means of public speech or political organizing, hit upon the idea of leaving anonymous postcards calling for resistance in dozens of public places around the city. The city police and then the Gestapo tracked the postcards and finally captured them. Interrogations followed, with signed confessions. Thanks to the careful filing of the Gestapo, the story and many of the postcards that were handed in by frightened or patriotic Berliners, have survived. The novelist Hans Fallada wrote a fictional version of this story in 1946, called Every Man Dies Alone.

2. In October of 2009, a British company called Trafigura attempted to prevent the Manchester Guardian from reporting on its activities using a recent innovation of the British legal system called a super-injunction. Ordinarily, a British newspaper would be free to report on the activities of Parliament, but Trafigura secured a super-injunction that had the effect (though likely not the intention) of preventing the Guardian from covering a question that had been asked in Parliament about Trafigura’s actions involving toxic waste dumping off the coast of Africa. The Guardian’s October 13 daily audio report or podcast indicated that they were being prevented from reporting but could say little more. Editor Alan Rusbridger used his Twitter account to alert his many hundreds of Twitter followers of the cryptic “we cannot report” story on the Guardian’s site, and within 42 minutes one of those readers found the question asked in Parliament, linked to it, and announced it to the world. By the next day, Trafigura’s legal team backed down somewhat on the injunction, and the Guardian resumed reporting the activities of Parliament.

What to make of the two cases, in light of the changes that are caused by social media? Let’s look at platform, speed, reach, and response.

Platform. Hampel chose to leave postcards in public places around Berlin as a kind of broadcasting, perhaps the only kind he was able to imagine in those circumstances. It seems likely that a few hundred people may have seen the postcards over a period of months, but the only record is the listing of cards turned in to the police and the Gestapo. Rusbridger chose Twitter, where his account has about 7000 followers or subscribers who received his brief entry within moments of posting. In another few moments, some of his readers passed his “tweet” along to their followers, instantly multiplying the readership.  One of Rusbridger’s readers, actor Stephen Fry, has about one million followers on Twitter, so his “retweeting” hugely multiplied the spreading of the news.

Speed and reach. Presumably both Hampel and Rusbridger reached some readers in moments, but due to the multiplier effect of Twitter Rusbridger’s words spread around the world in a very short time. Hampel probably reached just a few readers with each postcard.

Response. The responses to Hampel’s words are mostly lost to history, with the exception of those documented in his Gestapo file, which clearly serve the purposes of the state apparatus in a time of massive injustice. Rusbridger’s words speak to a social problem not nearly as far-reaching as the one Hampel addressed, but his platform, Twitter, makes response instantaneous and painless.  As a result, a small movement was formed around the social problem he was addressing, and dialogue commenced, research was undertaken, new publications in Twitter and in other formats launched in response, and a significant social institution was made to take notice in less than a day. The platform’s speed, reach, and especially its ease of response utterly changed the social possibilities for writing a few words about a social problem.

For the two writers did not have very different goals, one might guess. But the platforms were radically different, and the social opportunities created by the platforms too.

Some traditional forms of rhetorical analysis (writer, intention, relation to audience, choice of medium, etc.) probably need to be updated in order to take into account these new possibilities.

The November 2009 issue of Harper’s commences with an interesting essay by Steven Stoll on the significance of the “Little Ice Age,” a puzzling period of cold that made things tough for many human communities for a few hundred years starting around 1300, perhaps. I refer to it here, though, not for its environmental implications but because there is a nice paragraph that might serve as a class model for organizing information as a  catalog or list. To provide context, I’ll include the sentence before and the sentence after the example paragraph:

Excavate the Middle Ages, and one unearths a geological event with enormous implications for how we think about and respond to climate.

Alpine people told of glaciers crushing villages. The growing season throughout northern Europe suddenly shortened by two months. Torrential rains and flooding at harvest devastated crops repeatedly throughout northern Europe during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Vikings arrived in Greenland late in the tenth century, at a time when they could plant wheat, but around 1350 the last residents ate their dogs before disappearing into the ice that had engulfed the southern tip of the island. As late as 1665, Norwegian wheat fields yielded just 70 percent of what they had produced in 1300. Cattle died on snow-covered pastures; wine and olive-oil production shifted south. A general sense of scarcity impelled agrarian people outward. Thousands of Europeans migrated to North America seeking relief, only to find the same impenetrable cold. Travelers and naturalists suspected for a century what geologists can now measure: the Northern Hemisphere fell into a frigid rut around 1350 that lasted until the nineteenth century.

This so-called Little Ice Age was not an ice age. (7)

A few things to notice about it: All but one of the examples is offered within the confines of its own single sentence, even if the example is complex. (That makes for nice sentence variety, by the way.) The topic sentence concludes the paragraph, doesn’t it? And that topic sentence is set up in terms that allow the essay to continue by turning to the question of proper naming, the question of definition, which is surely an element of argument.

And it’s quite vivid. Nobody who filled out this form in an exercise should have trouble writing something of real specificity and even, perhaps, vividness.

PS.  Here is a prose poem (?) by Czeslaw Milosz that also stands as a good model of listing that turns into something more by the end of the paragraph:

Tomber amoureux. To fall in love.  Does it occur suddenly or gradually?  If gradually, when is the moment “already”?  I would fall in love with a monkey made of rags.  With a plywood squirrel.  With a botanical atlas.  With an oriole.  With a ferret.  With a marten in a picture.  With the forest one sees to the right when riding in a cart to Jaszuny.  With a poem by a little-known poet.  With human beings whose names still move me.  And always the object of love was enveloped in erotic fantasy or was submitted, as in Stendhal, to a “crystallization,” so it is frightful to think of that object as it was, naked among the naked things, and of the fairy tales about it one invents.  Yes, I was often in love with something or someone.  Yet falling in love is not the same as being able to love.  That is something different. (“Falling in Love,” from Road-side Dog)

It’s interesting with this one to see that the catalog has a progression that we are meant to pick up on, reflecting the stages of the speaker’s life and leading to the distinction drawn in the final sentences.  Catalogs are shaped; Sears understood this long ago.

I’ve been thinking about the South Bend Tribune’s 9/30 editorial supporting area businessman Ibrahim Parlak in his years-long struggle to stay in this country. The editorial speaks of “the injustice and disproportionality of the federal government’s war on Parlak.” (Their link will expire on the 7th day.) Now if you wanted as a journalist or paper to really throw your weight behind this editorial, or even if you wanted to give readers and area citizens more information so they could make up their own minds based on a good amount of information–before writing their elected officials, say–how about posting the editorial with links and supporting materials? One keyword for bloggers is “generosity” but many newspapers actually hoard their archive, which may or may not be short-sighted, and they rarely link to other resources outside their own site.  But what if they “curated”–another blogging word–an archive of materials on Parlak’s case, gathering from their own stories and other resources until they had the best Parlak collection on the web.  They could, in that sense, essentially own this story, as far as the web goes, and they’d probably start to show up at the top of the Google listing for his name. Some obvious and a little less obvious aspects that could be developed:

• Post the editorial with links laced into the story.
• Post the contact information for appropriate government officials, including web links and phone numbers.
• Remind people that letters don’t arrive at Washington offices until they’ve been checked by some security agency–use email, web, phone, and provide those links.
• Wikipedia has a rudimentary article, as of today, that the newspaper could greatly surpass in an hour.
• The NY Times Magazine cover story of four years ago would be a valuable link.
• Check out at least a few good blog posts on the subject, including foes.
• Check out other regional newspapers for links: Kalamazoo, Chicago, Detroit, etc.
• Check out regional TV web archives for video.
• Try Flickr, Facebook, etc.
• Check out the support group’s web site and Parlak’s restaurant web site.
• Offer links to the current legislation supporting his case.
• And cut loose and open the paper’s archive for earlier pieces on the issue–why not?
• Etc.

Then invite readers to contribute their own links and insights to make the curated page even stronger. (Share the curating duties…) In time, surely a paper would have the most useful site on the issue, perhaps with a nice spread of perspectives and links to a variety of media and genres. And people would have shared in the work. Then if there is justice to be served, active citizens have the information they need to think it over and to speak up.

From an old blog posting, something that seems just right for teachers to turn into a mantra here at the start of the school year: 

We habitually underestimate our students. We habitually underestimate our students. We habitually underestimate our students.

Former Marine Tyler Boudreau writes about recovering from the psychic wounds of combat:

They say war is hell, but I say it’s the foyer to hell. I say that a lot. I say coming home is hell, and hell ain’t go no coordinates. You can’t find it on the charts, because there are no charts. Hell is no place at all, so when you’re there, you’re nowhere–you’re lost. The narrative, that’s your chart, your own story. There are guys who come home from war and live fifty years without a narrative, fifty years lost. They don’t know their own story, never have, and never will. But they’re moving amidst the text everyday and every long night without even realizing it. They’re out there beyond the wire, trudging through the sentences, tangled in the verbs, suffocating on the adjectives, wrecked by the names.

They live inside the narrative like a cell and their only escape is to understand its dimensions. Once you get it, maybe you can start tearing down the walls. Every soldier’s mind is different. There is no single code to break. It’s ever-changing. I don’t have a recipe, but there’s one thing I do know and that is the power of the narrative. Put the story together. Understand the story. Ask questions of the story; make it answer you. Make it. You don’t take no for an answer. You find the answer. You keep building that narrative until the answer comes around. That’s the low road out of hell. (Packing Inferno, 148)

So the wounds, psychic and otherwise, turn the world into a chartless place — everything stable is torn, all the patterns break. To live in the chartless land is to pay endlessly for the past; or to freeze everything in order to keep from feeling the heat of it all again. But putting the story of experience back together, drawing out the patterns — this is a way of making a chart for the torn and broken one, for oneself. And as you get to know the story, some of its powers diminish and some of its elements can be beaten back or caste away. Knowing the story well enough, you will see it cough out its secrets one by one. These secrets are not the keys to Disneyland, but they are keys.

In reading around in the book, I gather that the story is not only one’s own experience, but also the broad patterns of one’s society. For him, as a combat Marine in Iraq, the contradictions (win hearts and minds; kill in combat or out of fear) handed to him by his countrymen as a mission shape the personal story. His story lives within the webbing of his country’s story. The story he must interrogate is both his and his country’s. Hence the link to yesterday’s note:

…being educated might be this: … Being able to make an informed decision about the story your culture likes to tell.

One definition of being educated might be this: Knowing the story your culture likes to tell itself well enough to be able to make up your own mind about it. Being able to make an informed decision about the story your culture likes to tell. If you can’t accomplish that basic move, you’re trapped in the story, yes?

…were these: Can the university hope to escape the forces of change that have imposed themselves so disruptively on journalism? Or must the university too learn how to earn its authority in a new way?

Judging by the ways I hear people talking about social media on campus, this new set of tools is seen primarily as an aid to marketing, and so the problem is taken to be a marketing problem. That means that the deeper disruption, the reshaping of attitudes about authority, that has, it seems, touched journalism, is not thought to be an issue for colleges and universities. Judging by the words and actions of administrators and marketers, the audience simply demands that we use these new tools, but nothing more.

If so, then the conversation is much more mature among journalists than among academics. We academics assume our position is secure. Why we might do so in an age when state funding for public colleges and universities is covering smaller portions of the school budget each year, when full-time faculty are a minority of the faculty at many schools, and when part-time faculty often work in abusive labor conditions, I don’t know. I guess the tenured folks are getting by. (Full disclosure: I have tenure.)

No wonder it is so interesting to keep an eye on what journalists are thinking about this crisis — it may very well be our crisis over here in a few years.

I’ve been reading and listening in and watching the work of Jay Rosen this summer, as he continues to collaborate with Dave Winer and others on the problem of reshaping journalism for the challenges of our time. I’d like to jot down some of my mental notes and see what they look like. I take Rosen to be arguing, among other things, this:

In professions such as journalism, writers’ perspectives are necessarily limited and error is fundamental. Authority that is merely asserted by journalists rather than earned is increasingly unpersuasive as well as alienating to readers, but our unfolding understanding of social media suggests a direction forward. Social media invite and facilitate corrections and the diversity of perspective that make corrections possible, and authority can now be earned through increasingly rich and open practices rather than merely asserted.

Those practices are being sketched by a variety of journalists, and some patterns are starting to emerge. The one deeply uncertain thing, though, is how to make it pay enough for the better parts of journalism to carry on in whatever old and new formats we need for the years ahead.

My own further questions are these: Can the university hope to escape the forces of change that have imposed themselves so disruptively on journalism? Or must the university too learn how to earn its authority in a new way? Beyond the great importance of journalism, that’s what interests me in thinking about Jay Rosen’s work right now.

In a celebration of the career of the late literary critic Richard Poirier, Alexander Star addresses the tension central to literary language, and perhaps many other uses of language as well. A writer struggles with and against the meanings that have gone before:

In painstakingly close readings, [Poirier] showed that poets like Robert Frost and Stevens and a novelist like Norman Mailer seek to trumpet their individual voice, but when they do so, they find that they are using words that are not truly their own or that they are imprisoned by previous self-definitions. “Struggling for his identity within the materials at hand,” they “show us, in the mere turning of a sentence this way or that, how to keep from being smothered by the inherited structuring of things,” Mr. Poirier wrote. (“Richard Poirier: A Man of Good Reading,” NY Times, 8/23/09)

“The inherited structuring of things” here might include the fuzzy practicalities of common sense, the grasp various professions have on some portions of our experience through specialized language, the guiding generalities of our great founding national documents, the ritualized meanings of our institutions of education and religion, the comfortingly familiar tropes of our movies and pop songs, the cynical subtexts of government spending, the unchallengeable stock phrases of political rhetoric, and so forth. Poirier took a wide view of the matter in the passage Mr. Star sampled in his essay:

When a writer is most strongly engaged by what he is doing, he can show us, as if struggling for his identity within the materials at hand, he can show us, in the mere turning of a sentence this way or that, how to keep from being smothered by the inherited structuring of things, how to keep within and yet in command of the accumulations of culture that have become a part of what he is. Much of cultural inheritance is waste; it always has been. But only those who are both vulnerable and brave are in a position to know what is waste and what is not. (The Performing Self: Compositions and Decompositions in the Languages of Contemporary Life, xxi)

The writer risks something — a sense of self-fashioning? the power to speak and act? — by living among the inherited truisms and contradictory common senses of the age. Yet over time someone has been doing the “structuring of things” that is passed down to us as culture, and that process continues.  The artist is one of the players who takes a hand in the work that each generation much do to receive and sustain and pass on the great unwieldy mass of custom and meaning and nonsense.

For Star, as for Poirier, this basic tension in language and society, between inherited structure and innovation, reveals a struggle for agency and speech that has implications for our understanding of self:

The principal hero of this struggle was Emerson, whose reputation Mr. Poirier did much to redefine, challenging the familiar view of him as a facile optimist, a woozy metaphysician or an enabler of laissez-faire capitalism. Nor would Emerson have embraced the modern notion of “the self as something put together by a person who is then required to express it and to ask others to confirm it as an identity.” Rather, he saw the self as something very much like what Frost called a poem: “a momentary stay against confusion.”

We need a space for self-fashioning, but for Poirier this space is in and among the materials of culture.  More than a merely private and  “momentary stay against confusion,” the individual’s expression organizes the messy mass of cultural materials provisionally, and bits of that work stick. And it’s a good thing, too; there is too much noise and junk that we would be, as Poirier says, “smothered” if it were not so.

But it wouldn’t “stick,” would it, unless the speech and acts of the individual were part of the group’s consciousness — were processed, at least sometimes, by a community that itself changed as individuals changed, that spoke because individuals spoke. The theory of assertive selfhood requires a theory of change in community. Both require the tensions that language contain and reveal in culture. They all require a place for work to get done.

Notes for next time around: Available here for entending the discussion might be Bakhtin, whose view was that language always operates via centripetal and centrifugal forces that both draw meanings into the control of social institutions and disrupt those patterns of meanings. And when following a line of thought involving Emerson and the lonely brilliance of the artist, it is tempting to see the whole matter as one of individual striving and literary genius, but that leaves out so many people.  What exactly is the social element? In what ways are groups involved in reshaping culture moment by moment? Or in making contexts for our individual self-fashioning? Do social media gives us clues about how individual acts coalesce into social patterns? And what portions is speech and what portion is action, as in the political sphere? Do social media reveal as well as change the way we work out the tensions discussed above? I hope that the answer is yes, at least in that there are new places for speech, for gathering people together, for sparking social action.