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 You are out of touch with reality, happily cocooned in your web of deceit and protected by the long outdated concept of “tenure”, which allows you not just “academic freedom”, but freedom to participate in the wanton desruction of the very institution which affords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.

It’s true. About a week ago I laid out my little plan for conferences and publications for the next several months. Next month I am supposed to present my paper, “Save Our School: Multimodal Activism and the Struggle to Save the Early Learning Center at Kutztown University,” at the CCCCs in New Orleans. Alas, it does not look like it’s going to happen.

As much as I want to go to the conference and present that paper, I’ve had to come to terms with one pretty sobering fact: I do not have enough institutional funding to cover my expenses for two conferences this spring. Conferences are not cheap. For example, the registration fee for RSA in May was $210. Just the fee ate up all of my department funding. Given that the conference is in Seattle, my plane fare and hotel will more than eat up my university funding. In other words, I will be paying for a portion of that conference anyway. If I want to go to both conferences, one will have to come entirely out of my pocket. Given that I’ve been busting my butt for the past several years to live within my means, I’ve had to accept the fact that I simply cannot afford to go to both conferences.

That’s not easy to accept. The teaching and service load here has already taken a toll on my research and scholarship. And despite the fact that Kutztown is supposed to be a teaching intensive/focused university, there are increasing expectations to publish. The problem is that the material support for research and scholarship has not risen even close to the rate of expectations. Don’t get me wrong…no one takes a job at a teaching intensive university expecting to keep a full research agenda going. As the saying goes, something’s gotta give.

Anyway, I’m just frustrated. If we were getting strong support for teaching here, I might not be so bitter right now. But the increasing class sizes, a lack of adequate office space, and a finance-driven approach to curriculum by our current administration and State System just wears me down sometimes.

I guess I’ll just concentrate on getting that conference paper turned into an article for publication. I’ll miss the intellectual engagement of the CCCCs.

At the very least I guess I should be happy to learn that I’ve been more productive. Funny. I don’t feel more productive. I just feel tired.

So, I’m planning for conference number three this year…I thought it would be a good idea to begin teasing out the distinctions and connections among my papers. For my CCCCs paper, “Save Our School: Multimodal Activism and the Struggle to Save the Early Learning Center at Kutztown University,” I will be looking at how members of an emerging coalition of faculty, students, and parents made, in Nancy Welch’s terms, “rhetorical space through concerted, often protracted struggle for visibility, voice, and impact against power interests that deny visibility, voice, and impact” (Welch 477). In particular, this paper is interested in the “multimodal” character of that work. That is, the “Save the ELC” coalition not only made use of traditionally recognizable forms of activism like petitions and demonstrations, but also made use of new technologies and social networking software in making their case. I am also interested in how that rhetorical space took shape and how tricky it was to sustain it as the struggle to save the ELC wore on. For the record, the struggle continues and there remain serious concerns about the university’s long-term commitment to the school.

My second paper is for RSA in May: “Holding Back the Membership: Breaking Cycles of Despair and Rhetorics of Power in a Contract Negotiations Year.” This paper is part of the panel “Responsible to Whom for What?: Complex Audiences at Cross-Purposes in Labor Organizing,” with my fellow APSCUF-KU Exec member Ken Ehrensal as well as Seth Kahn and Cheryl Wanko from West Chester University. In that paper, I look at a dispute within members of our union, APSCUF, during our recent contract negotiations. I am particularly interested in the ways in which dominant and emergent concepts of unionism played out in terms of strategy and tactics and how members sought to remake a union identity.

Finally, I am now working on a paper proposal for the 2008 Watson Conference and I am thinking about similar issues. At the moment my working title (emphasis on “working”) is “Mediated Advocacy: A Look at the Impacts of New Technologies in a Campus Campaign.” We’ll see where this one goes. I just put the rough sketch of this paper together today (finally)…still very rough, but you get the idea.

As I was working on the Watson proposal today, I began to think about linkages and what shape these three papers might take as a project–both in terms of publishing, but also in terms of a direction for further scholarship. I guess I like the questions I am posing and the fact that each paper is taking up similar questions in different contexts. And all of this builds nicely, if I don’t say so myself, from Rachel’s and my forthcoming book, Democracies to Come. If there we are working through notions of rhetorical action, political-communities-in-struggle, and micro-negotiations of hegemony, these three papers seem like a fitting extension and elaboration on that work. Interesting.

Sorry for all this “insider” talk–inside my head that is. I just needed to get some of this stuff out on the page. I think it’s time to think about hitting the sack for the night. It’s a big weekend after all. My grandmother is turning 90! And she still bowls.

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!

I don’t know why I feel the need to re-post posts. “If you were stranded on a desert island, what would you bring.” But this is not a desert island. I could simply put a link to this previous post…but, no. I have to re-post.

I was actually about to begin writing about on of the recent emails circulating on campus. I want to turn my rhetorical lens there and see what happens. I guess I wanted to provide a little context? After spending so much time talking about context with my students, maybe it’s rubbing off too much! Anyway, here’s the set up for the post I may yet write today:

Well it’s 2008 and D. and I have had some time to relax and talk about our cookery and all things rhetorical. In particular, I’ve been thinking a lot about (re)connecting parts that have been alienated or at least estranged for a few years now. The connection between my research, my teaching, service and committee work, and my union/activist work. Or course these areas have never been completely separate, I have found my time at Kutztown has stretched each of these areas in somewhat different, and often competing, directions.

Put another way, in the process leading up to tenure, I agreed to serve on this committee, this committee, and that committee. My goal was to do the work that that committee needed done. I continued to work on my book (just finished! and soon to be published!) that continued questions and concerns that grew out of my time in Washington, DC and my first couple of years here. And I learned the ins and outs of our local union, worked to change our union, and am now a member of our executive committee. I can look through my eight (more?) tenure binders and see all the work I’ve done. And, I could, I guess, be proud of that work. However, there is something consistently troubling about it–I struggle to find the connecting threads. That is, I feel that in my time here I have been trying to negotiating four competing “identities,” so to speak. It seemed as though I was constantly responding to each of these areas separately.

So, I’ve had a break now and have spent time with my good ole pal Dionysus and have been shifting my gaze so to speak. The questions that I am now trying to work with are about reconnecting all aspects of what I do–instead of compartmentalizing and juggling.

What does that mean specifically? Well, with our book done, I will now be turning to the everyday “rhetorical work” I do in the union as one of my areas of research. I want to consider, analyze, and learn from these struggles as part of a rhetoric of advocacy. A new course I am just about ready to present to my department is called “Rhetoric, Democracy, Advocacy”–again, connected. My next two conference papers–on at CCCC’s in New Orleans and another at RSA in Seattle–will analyze the struggles around the ELC and our contract negotiations. I plan on turning both of these into publications.

Why do it this way? Well, it seems to me that the reason I got into this whole thing–academe, that is–was the same reason I’ve been an activist, a unionist, and an agitator. I believe in democracy and the struggle to equality, justice, and what is right. I believe, as Frederick Douglass put it: “power cedes nothing without a demand.” I teach writing because I believe that writing and literacy are key to developing critical democratic citizens and advocates. I work to change the university because I believe colleges and universities are one of the few places left that hold out the promise of critical inquiry, democratic exchange, and citizen education.

So, I hope to use this space, too, as a space to think through things…to, draft my thoughts and to build a written trace of my inquiries.

One of the things that got me to write today was something I’ve been thinking about over the past several days as I drive to and from work. Our union is introducing a discussion about of a vote of no confidence in Kutztown University President Cevallos. And, as you can imagine, this has caused a stir. Once again I am all too aware of patterns of arguments. Arguments that you become quite familiar with if you do any kind of oppositional, activist work. I began thinking of them as “commonplace arguments,” that can be addressed as a “class of argument.” So, I’ll do some of that here. And I particularly like the following way of thinking about “commonplaces” in rhetorical traditions:

Commonplaces:

“Commonplaces are small nuggets of language that carry a lot of weight for a particular group or in society at large, at a given time. They can be slogans, bumper stickers, catch-phrases, or simply pieces of language that we use all of the time, but which are more complicated than we realize, perhaps because they are so very common. Because they can be evoked in the same way as a slogan or an idea, objects such as ‘the flag,’ and documents such as ‘The Constitution’ (especially ‘The First Amendment’ and ‘The Second Amendment’) also function as commonplaces in rhetoric.”

“Commonplaces: An Introduction,”

Professor John Hilgart, English Department, Rhodes College
and Professor Van E. Hillard, First-Year Writing Program, Duke University

Talk to you soon!