Given some of the discussions we’ve all been having on our campus about class size, the Academic Forum, and the purpose of education and my interest in multimodal activism, I thought I’d post this little ditty for your enjoyment…I (re) found it on my old pal Byron’s blog.

After I posted here last night, I wandered over to the No Confidence blog to poke around in the comments. I found some interesting comments…most notably this one:

Dr. Mahoney, you ARE a liar. Regardless of your protestations otherwise and the philosophical dribble you use as a smoke screen to your true self, the raw, true facts are that you are a prevericator to the nth degree. You exaggerate, overstate, mistate, and lie. Your perceptions are skewed and it would appear that you have not visited any other institution of higher education (and especially not any other PASSHE campus)in the last ten years to see the state of affairs at those campuses, else you would not whine, yes WHINE to the level that you do. You are out of touch with reality, happily cocooned in your web of deceit and protected by the long outdated concept of “tenure”, which allows you not just “academic freedom”, but freedom to participate in the wanton desruction of the very institution which affords you these priveleges. You and your elitist academic “brothers and sisters” of APSCUF gave up your rights to governance by joining a collective bargaining unit. Governance is the act of shared management of an institution of higher education; by its very definition, a union is not management, thus, how can you claim the right to participate in the management of it? You have no responsiblity or accountability, your union mentality makes you merely destructive parasites with nothing but entitlement as your moniker. One can only hope that if nothing else results from this APSCUF created crisis, that you and your ilk are exposed for what you truly are.

February 18, 2008 9:03 PM

Funny…that was right after I was writing about my lack of funding for conferences. I guess I’m just a whiner after all.

The whole discussion on the No Confidence blog has been interesting for the kind of arguments that are made…overtly and by implication as well. Frankly, I expect these kind of personal attacks…I think anyone with any activist experience learns to expect that when you work for any kind of change, the first line of attack is generally personal. If you are thin-skinned or take offense easily, activism and advocacy will take a heavy toll.

As I may have mentioned before, I am working on writing a class called “Rhetoric, Democracy, Advocacy.” The kind of exchange I am having with “Harry Potter” and “anonymous” may very well make it onto the syllabus. I think these kind of everyday moments are absolutely critical to work on. After all, these are the kind of exchanges that affect activists and advocates on a direct, often personal level. But, even more so, they point to the “micro-negotiations of hegemony” and how specific discursive formations are policed and disciplined. In a very real sense, these exchanges offer a chance to understand how hegemony is maintained.

Here is part of my exchange with “anonymous”:

What you seem to be arguing is that the only people who have any right to work for positive change are those living/working in the most destitute conditions. Only the poorest of the poor, mistreated of the mistreated, have any right to call for change. Everyone else in your argument seems to lose their right to work for a better world. And by “better world” I do not mean utopia. I just mean leaving the world a better place.

We might be able to group “anonymous’s” response more broadly under the category of “love-it-or-leave-it.” But, it becomes important, I think, to make the assumptions of the argument explicit so it is possible to respond to the core of the argument. I think too many times the temptation is to respond to the personal attack with a counter attack. In my mind, that is one of the things the first attack is supposed to do.

Anyway, just a few thoughts before work. That’s right…I still go to work, even when I do not have to teach, despite my whining.

Here’s what I just posted to the vote of no confidence blog:

By a vote of 45 to 15 (with 4 abstentions) APSCUF-KU Representative Council has authorized a vote of no confidence in President Cevallos.

Over the next two weeks APSCUF-KU will hold several faculty meetings to discuss the bill of particulars in even more detail. Links to the bill of particulars and other supporting documents can be found on the right-hand sidebar and the APSCUF-KU web site.

Further details about the voting dates and upcoming meetings will be posted here as soon as they become available.

45 to 15. It’s interesting. You never quite know how these things are going to break. I want to note as well that a member of the Music Department brought a “no confidence in APSCUF-KU Exec” motion to the floor as well. I seconded the motion. I thought it was important to have that vote too since some faculty have made a case that they are “greatly disappointed” in APSCUF-KU leadership and have inferred that that is also the feeling of “lots of other faculty as well.” However, when it comes down to it, numbers speak.

The vote of no confidence in our leadership was defeated. 7 representatives voted no confidence, 49 voted confidence in our leadership. I say our here because, of course, I am a member of APSCUF-KU Exec.

I seconded that motion because I thought it was an important discussion and vote to have. I for one have worked hard over the past 5 years to turn our APSCUF-KU local into a strong, fighting union. A union that actually served it’s members and worked to bring more membership involvement. When I first came to KU our union was deemed largely ineffective by most faculty. My early involvement seemed to confirm that. Don’t get me wrong, there were many people in the union who were working incredibly hard. But it was not, for the most part, an activist union.

Now that we are much more proactive and strong, we are getting resistance in the other direction…Are we pushing too hard? Are we doing too much? Are the faculty content with the way things are? Do they want to return to the days when the union was not so active? For that reason, I thought we–at the very least I–needed to hear if Rep Council had confidence in our leadership or not. 49 Reps said they did have confidence. 40 Reps said, we want to continue as an active, fighting union.

To all those Reps who showed confidence in our leadership…I thank you. You may well be the reason I stay at KU.

Well, it’s just about 11:30 on Valentine’s Day. I taught this morning–saw the second part of the Frontline Documentary The Persuaders–and I will teach again at noon and 1:30. After that is the Rep Council meeting that everyone has been waiting for. We will be considering a vote of no confidence in Kutztown University President, Javier Cevallos. All the discussion that has taken place across campus, in our department meetings, on-line, on the blog, and in the media now is a backdrop for a decision today. The decision? Whether or not APSCUF-KU should proceed with a vote of no confidence.

Yes my friends…these are heady times. What has been interesting throughout this discussion is that there has been virtually no discussion on the specifics of APSCUF-KU’s bill of particulars–that is, of our actual reasons for introducing a discussion of a vote of no confidence. What’s also interesting is to watch the dynamics of how faculty members (in particular) relate to the issue of a no confidence vote. I don’t mean whether specific faculty members do or do not have confidence in President Cevallos. No, what I am thinking about has to do with how faculty responses show particular understandings of democratic literacies–that is, the everyday practice of democracy.

I recall in Habermas’s study of the “bourgeois public sphere,” a discussion of the interconnection between that public sphere and particular bourgeois values (and I don’t mean to position “bourgeois values” here in a derogatory sense like they’re “bougie.” I am thinking of these values in their historical sense). I am thinking about this because much of the discussion around the vote had to do with the way the discussion was introduced and how and through what media the discussion was introduced. Put another way, the tenor of the public discussion (at least in terms of the faculty discussion) seems to point to some kind of Emily Post guide to the ettiquette of public discourse, or institutional behavior. Something like that.

More to come on this for sure…I’ve gotta go teach.

The other night I had trouble sleeping…too much going though my head. Instead of letting my restlessness go to waste, I decided to pay Dio a visit just to run some stuff by him. When I told him what was keeping me up all night, he laughed and laughed and laughed. “All I can think about is making sausage,” I tell him. No matter how hard I tried, I could not let my thoughts settle into sleep.You see, I like sausage. I like those sausage biscuits with egg at Wawa, I like summer sausage, I like turkey sausage, Italian sausage, chorizo sausage, even tofu sausage. Don’t get me wrong, I am not claiming to be some kind of sausage “aficionado.” I just like the stuff and think that the world is a better place for having sausage in it.

But here’s my conundrum: when I start thinking about what goes into making sausage, I get a little queezy. It’s rather disconcerting. I mean, it’s one thing when the image I have in my head is of the family farmer bringing her or his pigs to the local butcher. You know, the kind of images conjured up by Bob Evans commercials. It’s another thing entirely when you have the image of factory farms and the mass production of meat that we are introduced to in Fast Food Nation, for example. You see, I want to imagine the sausage I eat through the Bob Evans lens. But, I confessed, that’s difficult to do. Yeah, I know, I could go to Dietrich’s Meats or Allentown’s Farmer’s Market and then I would have a better idea how my sausage is made. So, maybe I’m just being lazy.

“Look,” Dio said, “you’re coming at this all wrong. I hate getting serious on you, but you’ve thought yourself into the classic consumerist corner.” He explained his surprisingly complex theory of that consumerist corner. I’m still thinking about it.

Let’s see if I can reconstruct it a bit here. My problem was that I was caught (even more than I had realized) by a rather sophisticated pattern of argument. First, there’s the obvious issue of the real conditions of production–that is, the “way” that sausage is made. It’s true that mass production of sausage on the factory model leads in pretty disturbing directions. Sausage, after all, is mostly made up of scrap pieces of meat–and not all of the those pieces of meat are, shall we say, “meat.” There’s all sorts of stories of rats, feces, and pieces of human flesh making it into mass produced sausage. After all, with everything ground up, it’s not easy to distinguish scrap ham from scrap rat. Because of these (very real) stories, we hear the cliches “you don’t want to know how sausage or legislation is made.” The force of that piece of conventional wisdom is to encourage you to ignore the process of sausage-making. Ignorance, after all, is bliss. It’s an odd, but powerful, sort of move. If we accept this notion, then we are encouraged to associate the ability to enjoy or desire sausage on the condition that we “forget” it’s process.

I have to admit that at this point Dio almost lost me. I mean, usually he’s kind of jolly…but here he was taking me for a winding intellectual journey. I was really just trying to put the whole sausage thing out of my mind.

Anyway, Dio stopped his discussion–perhaps recognizing my fading attention–to make sure I noticed the point he was about to make. “Notice that ‘forgetting’ is put back on the individual.” Huh? He pointed out that there was a conceptual shift in the argument from the actual process of sausage-making to the individual’s ability to enjoy sausage. The individual’s ability to enjoy sausage depends upon her or his willingness to forget about the process of sausage making. He insisted that that was an important point.

He explained that once the focus is shifted onto the individual, three things can happen. First, and most obviously, attention can be taken away from the process of production, insulating those making sausage from scrutiny. Second, the more abject the process of sausage-making is made, the greater the gap becomes between the everyday and the process of sausage-making. That is, if sausage-making is marked as “gross” or “horrific” then in the everyday we will turn away from it, thus decreasing our familiarity and comfort with the process. Finally, if someone calls attention to the process of sausage-making and the specific problems located in the sausage factory, others can now discipline that person on the grounds that she or he is interfering with her or his enjoyment or desire.

“Are we seriously talking about sausage alienation?,” I asked with a tinge of sarcasm.

“In way, yes. But remember, it’s never just about sausage…especially when we have a nice piece of conventional wisdom that uses sausage as a point of comparison,” I was told.

That reminded me of one of the books we are reading for my Advanced Composition class: George Lakoff’s, Don’t Think of an Elephant. Lakoff’s book deals with framing–specifically how progressive and conservative discourse is framed by different concepts of the family. He argues that “framing is about getting language that fits your worldview. It is not just language. The ideas are primary–and the language carries those ideas, evokes those ideas” (4). So, if we look at the conventional wisdom as a set of ideas (a commonplace argument, perhaps???), we’re talking about the ideas that are conveyed by the conventional wisdom about sausage-making. Given the grin that was extending across his bearded face, I could see that I was finally catching on.

“You are always talking about how rhetoric and democracy arose at the same time,” noted Dio. “So maybe it will help to do one of those flashback sequences for you. By 600-500BC, sausage-making was a pretty common practice. Common enough that folks in China, Greece, and Rome were mentioning it in their daily conversations and even in some of their notes,” he explained. “It was common enough, that is, that the concept of sausage was available for use as a metaphor. Don’t forget that there were a whole lot of people that hated the rise of democracy…and the idea of grinding up a bunch of different meats and packaging it in an intestine offers just too easy of a metaphor for those who hated democracy.”

I began to follow…surprisingly. I gave it a whirl.

So, basically, the sausage-making metaphor does work in a culture. If we move away from the particular issue of sausage-making and look for those “ideas” that are connected to the language, we could argue that:

1. One of the ways to divert attention away from the actual process through which something is made–e.g. decisions–and turn it toward the individual’s negotiation of her or his relationship to that process, has the affect of shielding the process from scrutiny. In effect, it takes the actual process of “making decisions,” to continue the example, as a given. As an individual I am asked to choose between discomfort and pleasure. If I agree to accept the process as a given, I am rewarded with enjoyment. Why be upset with something that can’t be changed? Or is the result of a force beyond one’s control?
2. If I assume that the process of making decisions (i.e. sausage) is messy, disturbing, upsetting, etc., then I will be inclined to not inquire into the specific ways in which they are made. The more common it is for me to “look away” from the process of decision-making, the less familiar the process becomes. That is, one becomes alienated from the process of decision-making. We know, however, that decisions still need to be made (someone has to make them) so we turn to a particular caste of people who make decisions. We enter into an uneasy agreement–you make the decisions and we will not ask how those decisions are made.
3. There is a problem with this agreement though. What happens when the products of the process (decisions, sausage, medications) are problematic, unhealthy, or dangerous? In those cases, we are in a bind. We don’t know how the decisions were made, so we can’t tell if there was malice, carelessness, or incompetence. We are not, after all, familiar enough with what goes into the process to evaluate it. If someone does begin to call attention to the process and speak in a language that suggests knowledge of the process of decision-making, we are confronted with the first bargain we made: we agreed to diverting our attention away from the process of production in exchange for pleasure, comfort, status, leisure, whatever. And if we have a sufficient investment in these latter things, we will view the person calling attention to the process as attacking us–we will defend ourselves. Ultimately we have to defend ourselves in a different language, though, since we cannot defend ourselves in the language of process. We call attention to the improper “way” in which the person is raising the question. We would draw attention to how the person is crazy for critiquing something that cannot be changed. We chastise the person for being “uncivil” or “improper.” We call attention to the fact that the person broke a social compact to turn our attention away from the process of making sausage.

“Hmmm,” I concluded.

Dio smiled again, handed me a cup filled with wine, and leaned back into his chair. “Now don’t go and make the same mistake you made last semester.”

“What do you mean?”

“You’ve got yourself all worked up with your analysis, I see. Just don’t turn your analysis into a rubric. There’s danger in introducing a false opposition that can lead you back to frustration,” he advised.

“Like….?”

“I like the whole thing you did there in your ‘#1? about exchanging pleasure for an agreement to ‘look away’ from the process of making X. However, that does not mean that ‘pleasure’ or ‘joy’ is in opposition to critical reflection. There is joy in decision-making, joy in critical analysis, joy in trying to draw attention to problems in the way things are done. The apparent opposition is also disciplining–it wants you to feel like you have to set aside joy if you are to be critical. How many of your lefty pals have made that mistake historically.” He paused for a moment, perhaps caught by a memory, and took a sip of wine. “Carnivals are important. Even if you are looked upon as improper or crude. If joy is seen as improper or crude, then we learn something about our cultures.”

We sat in quiet for a while until sleep finally closed in. I bid Dio goodnight and headed to bed. “Sausage,” I muttered. He smiled.

Sometimes, on my 30 minute commute to work I replay words and arguments over in my head to try and get a better grasp of their contours and what they seek to do, the affects they have, etc. In my co-authored book with Rachel Riedner, one of our chapters takes a look at the role of despair in neoliberal rhetoric. We describe the role of despair in neoliberal rhetorics as follows:

What we see in the everyday working of despair, is the work of hegemony at the level of habitus—“a system of lasting, transposable dispositions which, integrating past experiences, functions at every moment as a matrix of perceptions, appreciations, and actions” (Bourdieu 82-3). That is, despair is not limited to one specific kind of experience within neoliberalism. Rather, it is a transposable disposition, flexible enough to contain expressions of resistance. As part of a hegemonic discourse, despair sneaks into everyday arguments about current conditions and possible alternatives (79).

This “transposable disposition,” in my mind, is part and parcel of a kind of “neoliberal commonplace”–a persistent pattern of cultural argumentation.

I first started working on questions of despair when I was first getting involved with our local union chapter and teaching an Advanced Composition course called “Global Literacies.” In both my union work and in my class I noticed a recurring pattern of moral outrage followed by some version of the statement: “there is nothing we can do.” On the one hand, this frustrated the hell out of me–especially in the union context–but, the persistence of the argument made me think that I should be thinking about what it means and what it does [see excerpt for a brief intro into how Rachel and I situated this issue].

Anyway, that set me on my current path of taking an interest in the “micronegotiations” of hegemony, so to speak. That is, the everyday arguments made in everyday contexts that rise to the level of “commonplace arguments.” You could say, I am working on a “commonplace book” that focuses on neoliberal rhetoric [if you are interested in what a commonplace book is, check out this power point presentation floating out there on the web].

As you may or may not know, one of the hot conversations on our campus right now is a vote of no confidence in our university president. At this point, the issue is part of a public discussion and we do not know whether or not such a vote will be taken. But the issue has certainly sparked a spirited discussion among faculty and in the community at large. Some of the emails that have made it into my “commonplace book.” More accurately, they have occupied my mind during my drives to campus each morning and evening.

Here’s a brief list of some of the issues I have been thinking about:

• how do individuals identify with institutions, in this case with our university
• what is considered “proper” and how codes of civility and manners overlap in discussions of “process” or “the way” an issue was handled
• public image of an institution. In particular, public images as constructed in images and PR material (reputation) and/or public images based upon actual practices
• shades of progressive–”liberal” ways of seeing
• The role of institutional authority in argumentation (thinking Robin Lakoff’s arguments in The Language War here).

Oooops…look at the time. Gotta run to a meeting!