Don’t you hate it when you spend an hour or longer on a long post and then accidentally delete it and lose everyhing?

Oh well. I guess I’ll consider it brainstorming.

Maybe I’ll be more to the point this time. I was speaking with a colleague of mine today. He said I was a "polarizing’ figure in the department. I will own that. I express my views and make arguments based on them, and a large segment of the faculty disagree with me. He noted in particular that this blog was especially argumentative and described my posts here as having "slandered" faculty. He also pointed out that my e-mail signature includes a link to this website and he pondered what I was trying to do by doing that.

His comments gave me pause.  Mostly I write about new media rhetoric and other scholarly things that have nothing to do with the department. I would say around a dozen, maybe fifteen, of the nearly 100 posts on this site deal with SUNY is some manner, and perhaps half directly reference some event in our department.

There is one post I wrote about six months ago that expressed some real frustration on my part, and I said something about colleagues who "friggin do nothing" or some such. Anyway, the next day I wrote a post about how I had considered revising it, but didn’t. As I said then, "To be honest, I’m not all that happy with it myself, simply because it is more negative than I really hope to be. Nevertheless it is a record of my frustrations, so there it stands."

The post in question is curious to me because I had intended to write about something I call open source composition, but I didn’t really ever get there. Part of my decision to keep the post was to remind me about the rhetorical peculiarities of blogging, at least as I am engaged in it.

On the one hand, blogging is journal-like, personal, a record of one’s thoughts as they develop. In this sense it is similar to a private, diary discourse. On the other hand, blogs are obviously public websites. As I and others have said before, blogging at least presents an opportunity to deconstruct public/private binary. In this regard I am particularly interested in deconstructing the interiority or privacy of authorship, and more generally the interiority of cognition.

One of the upshots of this is a new ethical situation in which the contributors to this blog (and use they are multiple—anyone can comment and “I” may also be multiple) must negotiate a relationship with other readers/users of this site and their own process of knowledge production.

How do we read/write in this context? That’s what interests me.

Of course that in no way absolves me from the potential social consequences that result from my having this site.

Anyway, getting back to my motivation for this post, I don’t really mind being seen as polarizing, at least not in a situation I believe calls for insisting on a particular view being heard and considered. However, it does trouble me that others would view me as unethical, as sneaking off and slandering them on my website.

So I looked through my posts. I didn’t read them word for word; there is something like 100 of them. There is some strongly worded stuff in here. For instance, in one post titled “SUNY Cortland English Department: Where you at?” I write:

Ostensibly it is a conflict between literature and writing, or at least it has devolved into that. I believe this is a misunderstanding that has been perpetrated by the discipline as a whole. I see it instead as a conflict between those who maintain a bourgeois, hegemonic system of language and cultural values and those who take a critical and at least progressive or reformist, if not revolutionary or experimental view, of language and culture.

Those in the former, though typically literary studies specialists, may continue to proclaim the importance of writing; it is simply that by "writing" they mean grammatical correctness and the performance of certain stylistic conventions. They uphold traditional, canonical views of literature, including a strict limitation of interpretation within the bounds of new criticism. They tend to be luddites and to reject "postmodern" theory as absurd. Generally they teach in a lecture driven mode.

Now the point I was trying to make in the post is that I don’t think we have a conflict in our discipline between literary studies and rhetoric but rather a conflict that cuts different across and between those traditional intra-disciplinary lines (though I do think many literary studies faculty share the values I describe in this excerpt, while rhetoricians are more likely to share the opposing values).

Obviously it is just an argument, a somewhat new take on an old though still kickin’ conflict. Is it slanderous to suggest that those who uphold these values are also maintaining a “bourgeois, hegemonic system”? Well, whoever those people may be, they may take umbrage with this characterization. That’s fine. I take issue with many academics’ characterizations of theory or new media.

But this isn’t slander..at least I don’t see it as such. It simply poses a question to my colleagues to consider where they might see themselves in the context of this conflict.

Nor do I see it as invective to ask: "what does it take for an English department to realize the
world is changing around them, that their College is changing, that
their students are changing, that their own colleagues are changing and
finally begin to change as well?"

To me, these issues are not about people. They are about ideology and discourse. Clearly people are invested in specific ideologies and discourses. More accurately, ideologies and discourses invest the production of subjectivity. The project of making those investments visible and acting on them is not easy.

This is what I see going on.

#plaa{position:absolute;clip:rect(485px,auto, auto,485px);}