Comments on: Personal Writing: Theory and Method

By: vitia » Blog Archive » Weblogs as Liminal Oscillation

vitia » Blog Archive » Weblogs as Liminal Oscillation — Thu, 09 Mar 2006 07:03:39 +0000

[...] Let me make perfectly clear that I am in no way arguing for the elimination of pedagogies that carry a future-focused orientation on writing skills. I’m not at all saying that transactional writing is all bad and we should all be engaged in present-focused expressive writing: such a position would be absurd. Rather, I’m arguing towards a pedagogy that opens up room for both the future-focused and the present-focused; a pedagogy that allows for (and perhaps necessitates) a diversity of purposes for writing. And it seems to me there’s one particularly interesting form of writing that combines the transactional future horizon with the expressive present horizon in a way that makes understanding visible. Weblogs, I think, are today the best instantiation we have of a complex, polyvalent, processual form of writing that freeze their expressive value in the now while at the same time extending their transactional value into that distant horizon. Mariolina Salvatori talks about the hermeneutic move and the deconstructive move, and Peter Elbow talks about the believing game and the doubting game: to slightly paraphrase an earlier explanation I’ve offered, hermeneusis/believing/assent is an inhabiting-of, a highly present self-aware and reflective understanding of the constructed nature of a knowledge, its terms, how it comes to be, and all that makes it possible, seeing and inhabiting the circumstances that lead to its construction and simultaneously being and monitoring its belief-system. Deconstructing/doubting/dissent is a being-in-alterity, a future-looking critique, an unspinning of a notion’s inherent contradictions and seeing how that which is present within the thing at once calls forth its absent counterpart and in so doing makes visible the limits within which and by which that notion or knowledge is produced. The immaterial labor of writing a weblog, I think, collapses the sychronic and the diachronic, the hermeneutic and the deconstructive, the believing and the doubting, into a sort of liminal wave or oscillation between present and future, expression and transaction. [...]

By: mike

mike — Sun, 08 May 2005 20:58:06 +0000

Yup, sure did — and made good use of it (as well as the September 2003 issue) in putting together the 4Cs proposal with Sharon and Joanna. Thanks, though!

By: Clancy

Clancy — Sun, 08 May 2005 20:48:45 +0000

Hey, Mike, did you know College English had an issue devoted to personal writing a few years ago? Find College English, Vol. 64, No. 1, Sep., 2001 in JSTOR.

By: mike

mike — Wed, 13 Apr 2005 19:14:05 +0000

No annoyance, Clancy, though I’ll cop to some impatience in my comments at Sharon’s place, said impatience only arising from the fact that I’ve been very much following through in these thoughts on issues that you helped me see in the first place.

By: joanna

joanna — Wed, 13 Apr 2005 03:26:23 +0000

Yes, your example puts things in a much clearer light. Got it.

By: Clancy

Clancy — Wed, 13 Apr 2005 02:55:34 +0000

Oh, wait, I can see the comments now. Never mind!

By: Clancy

Clancy — Wed, 13 Apr 2005 02:54:50 +0000

Hey, Mike, thanks — this is helpful. What I’ve basically been doing, as you can gather, is asking that “What does it look like?” question most people find very annoying (I’m really not trying to be annoying in asking it though. I’m sincerely curious.). The Special Olympics example helps a lot.

Oh, by the way, on your post about the tarot card reading, I left a comment, and it says it’s awaiting moderation. I can’t read mine or any of the subsequent comments.

By: mike

mike — Tue, 12 Apr 2005 21:52:27 +0000

Joanna, it’s not at all a concern of privacy. There’s no reason for me to want to hide the fact that my mom died, and people who know how Bulbar Onset ALS works know that to watch its progress in a loved one is devastating — and I’d be a monster to not have been deeply affected by it. It’s not a concern with keeping private the event itself or keeping private the feelings attached to it, and if I were worried about the privacy of my own feelings, you’re right that I’d be a total idiot to shout it out to the millions of people on the internet.

Rather, my concern is with the uses to which personal experience is put. I would not wish to use my own experience, as Stone does hers, to make a political argument, because — for me — doing so would transform that experience. My worry about the “uneasy, difficult, slippery stuff” was in how close I felt I was getting to connecting a hugely loaded experience to making a pedagogical argument, not in concerns about privacy.

I still feel a little uneasy that I’m doing that right now, so let me shift gears. Imagine that I was deeply involved as a volunteer assistant coach with the Special Olympics, and spent a good number of hours each month working with a few athletes, and developed a bond with those athletes, interacting with them, but also seeing how other people interacted with them in different ways. Imagine I wrote an essay about this simply as an experience, trying to see the experience qua experience from my perspective, the athletes’ perspectives, the perspectives of others, and trying to inhabit those perspectives. I think I’d likely learn something. Now: imagine, instead, that I wrote about this experience as evidence for an argument. In doing so, I think I would alter the quality of that experience, and likely make it into an act of didacticism from which I would likely learn less that I might have with the first essay.

It’s a fine line, certainly. But I think it’s an important one. Does that make sense?

By: joanna

joanna — Tue, 12 Apr 2005 20:15:32 +0000

Thanks for explaining things, Mike. I think that if you feel very strongly about the privacy of your feelings about your mother’s death, then you’d be better off not writing about it,at least not here. Thinking about it is another matter–look at all the ways that the experience informs your writing and teaching and being.

By: mike

mike — Tue, 12 Apr 2005 19:49:03 +0000

Joanna — no, I don’t have to accept her conclusions to see her writing as an example of what I’m talking about. I think it’s an excellent example of how a writer might write about her own experience in attempting to inhabit both her mother’s experience and the experience of a prisoner being tortured to broaden her own perspectives and learn something beyond her own experience — and that writing about inhabiting one’s own perspective while simultaneously being-in-alterity (and writing about that being-in-alterity, as well) is something I’d hope I might continue to try to do and to encourage my students to do. And part of my point is that people with different experiences will come to different conclusions: my own experience, and my attempt to understand the experiences of others, lead me to a conclusion radically different from Stone’s, that conclusion being that this way of dying is not torture, and a further conclusion being that — because I do not think this way of dying is torture — the political conclusions Stone is able to draw and apply to her own experience would feel to me cheap and shabby were I to attempt to apply them to mine within the context of my mother’s death. That doesn’t mean they’re wrong, but only that they don’t fit into my context in the way they fit into Stone’s.

And now, of course, I’m suddenly uncomfortable thinking about this in terms of pedagogy. It’s uneasy, difficult, slippery stuff, making me think: am I cheapening this by talking about it?