Walking Methodologies in a More-than-Human World demonstrates that walking-with is an important methodology for thinking ethically and politically. Yet, Springgay and Truman assure us that ‘walking-with’ is best practiced with a method that betrays any strict adherence to method. While there is no stone left unturned (and if there is, it is because they have chosen to leave it there for the reader to engage with), their thinking is certainly not one that aims for an anchor. On the contrary, it is thought as provocation, as ‘research-creation’ of frictions, engagements (in)tension with the world. What a courageous intent given the spacetime in which they practice this endeavor, when global affect has reached a point of hatred with horrifying implications.–Patricia Ticiento Clough and Bibi Calderaro, Foreword to Walking Methodologies (2018)
Called back to Springgay and Truman’s 2018 Walking Methodologies in a More-than-Human World, dialed to a yes-hopefullysomething taking shape for next fall’s Conference on Community Writing in Detroit, October 23-25. So I meander back in again, leafing in this book released seven years ago, just as I was moving from Michigan to Virginia, a book I later excerpted for the seminars on research design I taught in Spring 2020 and again in 2022. Back then, I thought the book would sew throughlines with method as mess, with embodied wayfinding, with writing on foot, with more-than-words (or more-than-strong-text) rhetorical velocities, and with localized, here we are now, personal geographies. I don’t know how much of any of this carried over into practices or projects, yet, these few years later, it all still feels like a vibrant accrual, a bundle of possibilities I am not finished with, even if I can’t quite pinpoint why.
Yesterday, after a mid-morning dental checkup, some odontal dialogue about how the early September root canal on #19 has not fully quieted, humming as it does through a bite guard tested lately by a grim political horizon and other unsurenesses, personal and professional. I went to the office to polish and print a planning document for this Friday’s food studies meet-up, which I happen to be leading (on foodplaces), and to check off a few other minor to-dos. I remembered to pick up Walking Methodologies, to carry it home for re-reading. And again, as before, it strikes chords. For example, from the Foreword, the doing without anchor, a nod to groundlessness, or the summoning of method to call for its discarding strict, replicable proceduralism. I nod. Yes, this. This makes sense, these dotted footfalls. I am also drawn this time to the verbal methodology, ‘to walk’ supplying splendid, sensorial abundance, lattices of affect and memory, a well of noviceness, or beginner’s mind along the lines of ‘you can never step into the same river twice.’ This reminds me of Thich Nhat Hanh’s mindfulness essentials series, verbed as it is with eleven How to titles: How to Listen, How to Smile, How to Focus, How to Connect, How to See, How to Fight, How to Relax, How to Love, How to Eat, How to Sit, and How to Walk.1I might wish for a twelfth title, How to Draw. I would also pose with this exercise a recasting each verb as x-ing to learn, e.g., Walking to Learn, Relaxing to Learn, Listening to Learn, Drawing to Learn, and so on. Springgay and Truman’s WalkingLab and related research, when paired with the context of Hanh’s essentials, blooms consideration of what would it be to sketch and to explore methodologies verbed across this set: Listening Methodologies in a More-than-Human World, or Smiling Methodologies, Fighting Methodologies, Eating Methodologies, and so on. I suppose that’s what this thread loops me back to, a question, as a teacher, that cares for whether someone, in the frame of writing, or in the frame of being, is aware, reflectively, of experiences named by these (and other verbs). It’s nothing grandiose, just a simple provocation, to bundle as a set of teacherly a prioris questions like these (how do you eat, how do you see, how do you fight) and then to know, thereby, patchworks existential and if we are lucky that collage a more-than-humanism worthy of fostering.
Notes
1
I might wish for a twelfth title, How to Draw. I would also pose with this exercise a recasting each verb as x-ing to learn, e.g., Walking to Learn, Relaxing to Learn, Listening to Learn, Drawing to Learn, and so on.
A full month has blinked by in this run-up to the start of classes on August 26. That’s the day of our first meeting in ENGL6524: Theories of Written Communication. Recent weeks at the end of Rosemary Road included welcoming four new pullets, building a new coop and run, welcoming a rooster, hosting A’s friend from Minnesota, hosting Is. and then driving her to Michigan for her birthday, completing the final external promotion review letter of the season, and keeping aging grandpa’s pace with the rest of it all. This week I picked back up with class preparations, and I am making headway on the online hub for the class and the documents that will live there: syllabus, schedule, project descriptions, and bibliography. Here, for example, is the elaborated course description I settled on well enough to plug it into the landing page and syllabus:
Our seminar-styled study of theories of written communication this semester will begin with 1) considerations of what theory (θεωρέω, theóreó, 🔭) is and what it does, 2) how/why to engage with the theorizing sojourns and sightings of others, and 3) how this “bloom space” called theory has made us feel, especially as it hands a bouquet of possibilities to writing and rhetoric. Together we will read articles and chapters, book intros, and dissertation intros grouped with selected theoretical antecedents, thereby listening carefully for how theory circulates. Themes among these small sets include -isms and -graphies, root metaphors, academic writing and its alternatives, intellectual genealogies, expertise, rationalism, literacy development, and how we write. Readings will include selections by Gloria Anzaldúa, Mikhail Bakhtin, Deborah Brandt, Michel de Certeau, Manuel DeLanda, Yrjö Engeström, Harvey Graff, Joy Harjo, Cynthia Haynes, Julia Molinari, Beverly Moss, Stephen Pepper, Louise Phelps, Michael Polanyi, Malea Powell, Paul Prior & Jody Shipka, Jenny Rice, Jacqueline Royster, Kathleen Stewart, Eve Tuck & C. Ree, and more. Class activities will include weekly writing, discussion, a substantive project (Theory Deck/Microanthology), a presentation, and a course reflection.
For five or six semesters I have focused weekly writing on delimited increments called Nineties, which are ninety word flash responses later tuned stylistically because a ninety must have ninety words (allowing ±5) or a multiple of ninety. Like with The Hundreds, the incrementalism tends to elicit intensities, touched nerves, goose bumps, books thrown across the room, PDFs dragged to Trash, the felt weight of worlding now. So, 185 words is okay, as is 87 words. But 200 words is a bust. Although it may seem at first wrapped too snugly in a quantitative obsessiveness, it abides the principle of liberation by constraint, providing one less thing to think about, encouraging stylistic precision, and implicitly inventing an economy of intentional scope (favoring neither reductionism or expansionism by default). I continue to think there is value in a short planning pitch around Week Four or Five, and a share-out pitch nearer to the end of the semester, but then again, the schedule is busting at the seams and the readings and step-back readings will have to be cut back if there are two pitches. The larger project is also taking shape, though I have not written a prompt yet. I foresee it living up to the title Theory Deck/Microanthology, and assembling through defined sections: cover, frontmatter/intro, three articles, chapters, or excerpts, each with two theoretical antecedents (so sixnine pieces total), and a glossary of 6-8 elaborated keywords. Each section will have a suggested deadline, and then the eleven seminar participants will alert me to what sort of feedback they would like to receive: conference, audio comments, written comments.
I am still sorting out the order of readings and project pieces, and I am fairly sure I will have to scale back a bit (to say nothing of whether I have the willpower to stand at the scanner for hours getting this into accessible shape). I have already begun to understand that the book and dissertation intros will have to scale down from four of each to “choose one” from a set of four options, but even this might turn out to feeling denser than we’d like. Cake sponge needs air bubbles. And some class meetings will give us 30-40 minutes at the end for returning to the in-progress projects and for pace-keeping check-ins. Allowing for that possibility, here are the readings I am, for now, feeling good enough about and taking steps to assemble. Weekly placeholders are lightly and noncommittally noted, and second tier bullets are the corresponding step-backs:
Eve Tuck and C. Ree, “A Glossary of Haunting” (2013) (Week2)
Stephen Pepper, World Hypotheses: A Study in Evidence (1942) (excerpt) (Week3) Julia Molinari, What Makes Writing Academic (2022) (excerpt) (Week3)
Jacqueline Royster, “Academic Discourses or Small Boats on a Big Sea,” AltDis (Week4)
Deborah Brandt, Literacy as Involvement (1990), excerpt
Beverly Moss, “Creating a Community: Literacy Events in African-American Churches,” Literacy Across Communities (1994)
Malea Powell, “Listening to Ghosts: An Alternative to (Non)Argument,” AltDis (Week5)
Michel de Certau’s The Practice of Everyday Life (1984) (excerpt)
Joy Harjo, “The Woman Who Fell From the Sky” (1994)
Jenny Rice’s CE article, “Para-Expertise, Tacit Knowledge, and Writing Problems” (2015) (Week6)
Cynthia Haynes’ JAC article (later updated in The Homesick Phone Book (2016)), “Writing Offshore” (2003) (Week7)
Gerald Graff, “Hidden Intellectualism” (2001)
Manuel DeLanda, “Extensive Borderlines and Intensive Borderlines” (1998)
Paul Prior and Jody Shipka’s “Chronotopic Lamination” (2003) (Week8)
Mikhail Bakhtin’s The dialogic imagination (1981) (excerpt)
Yrjö Engeström. From Teams to Knots: Activity-Theoretical Studies of Collaboration and Learning at Work (2008)
Gloria Anzaldúa, “Putting Coyolxauhqui Together: A Creative Process,” Counterpoints, 1999, Vol. 90, How We Work (1999), pp. 241-261 (Week10)
Louise Phelps, “Rhythm and Pattern in a Composing Life.” Ed. Thomas Waldrep. Writers on Writing, Vol. 1. New York: Random House. 1985. 241-57. (Week10)
Book intros or first chapters (Choose one.) (Week11)
J. Logan Smilges’ Queer Silence (U Minnesota P, 2022)
Manning, Erin. The Minor Gesture. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2016. (excerpt)
Malhotra, Sheena, and Aimee Carrillo Rowe, eds. Silence, Feminism, Power:Reflections at the Edges of Sound. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. (excerpt)
Debra Hawhee, A Sense of Urgency (U Chicago P, 2023)
Fukushima, Annie Isabel. Migrant Crossings: Witnessing Human Trafficking in the US. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2019. (excerpt)
Vivian, Bradford. “Witnessing Time: Rhetorical Form, Public Culture, and Popular Historical Education.” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 44, no. 3 (May 27, 2014): 204–19.
Jennifer LeMesurier, Inscrutable Eating (Ohio State UP, 2023)
Ahmed, Sara. Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. Durham: Duke University Press, 2006. (excerpt)
Oum, Young Rae. “Authenticity and Representation: Cuisines and Identities in Korean-American Diaspora.” Postcolonial Studies 8, no. 1 (2005): 109–25.
Eric Detweiler, Responsible Pedagogy (Penn State UP, 2022)
Arendt, Hannah. “Reflections on Little Rock.” Dissent (Winter 1959): 45-56.
Ellison, Ralph. “Leadership from the Periphery.” In Who Speaks for the Negro? by Robert Penn Warren, 268–354. New Haven: Yale UP, 2014.
Dissertation intros or first chapters (Choose one.) (Week12)
Walwema, Josephine. Tactile Interfaces: Epistemic Techne in Information Design (2011, Clemson)
Buchanan, Richard. “Wicked Problems in Design Thinking.” The Idea of Design. Ed. Victor Margolin and Richard Buchanan. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995. Print.
Ong, Walter. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. London: Routledge, 1982. Print. (excerpt)
Sackey, Donnie. The Curious Case of the Asian Carp: Spatial Performances and the Making of an Invasive Species (2013, MSU)
Mol, Annemarie. (1999). Ontological politics: A word and some questions, in J. Law and J. Hassard (Eds.), Actor network theory and after (74-89). Malden, MA: Blackwell and the Sociological Review.
Callon, Michael, and Law, John. (1982). On interests and their transformation: Enrollement and counter-enrolment. Social Studies of Science, 12(4), 615- 625.
Faris, Michael. Rhetoric, Social Media, and Privacy (2012, Penn State)
Cooper, Marilyn M. “The Ecology of Writing.” College English 48.4 (1986): 364-375. Print.
Wysocki, Anne, and Johndan Johnson Eilola. “Blinded by the Letter: Why Are We Using Literacy as a Metaphor for Everything Else?” Passions, Pedagogies and 21st Century Technologies. Eds. Gail E. Hawisher and Cynthia L. Selfe. Logan: Utah State UP, 1999. 349-368. Print.
Carr, Allison. Negative Space: Toward an Epistemology of Failure (2014, Cincinnati)
Rose, Mike. Lives on the Boundary. New York: Penguin, 1989. Print.
Stewart, Kathleen. (2010) ‘Worlding Refrains’ in M. Gregg & G. Seigworth (eds) (2010) The Affect Theory Reader. London: Duke University Press, pp. 339-53.
Heap for scanning selections.
I glance it and see a heap of a list, with pairings or trios matched with ten of the fourteen weekly meetings. I’ve opted for no readings ahead of meeting one, the 26th. And I want to hold as a clearing Week Nine for project starts and for a round of dialogue focused on one well-begun component. Readings fall away at the end of the semester, too, allowing space in the two meetings after the late November break for short form presentations about the projects and for reflecting on what theories of written communication amounted to. My hope as I continue planning is that by the end and all throughout, ENGL6524 will feel like something we’ve been in, recalling that line I can’t stop thinking about from Kathleen Stewart’s “Worlding Refrains,” “Anything can feel like something you’re in, fully or partially, comfortably or aspirationally, for good or not for long” (340).
In what will be the fourth new grad class prep for me in two years, in seven more Mondays, I will begin teaching ENGL6524: Theories of Written Communication. 6524 is one of four required core courses in VT’s rhetoric and writing PhD program. The course description, which I would carbon date back to the program’s launch in 2007, reads, “Studies in theories applied to written communication. May be repeated twice for credit for a total of 9 hours when the topic varies.” Two sentences. The first sounds quite a bit like tautology, or maybe even doublespeak because the repetition isn’t varied enough: theories of written communication is a class that promises studies in theories applied to written communication. Notable here is that this graduate program also features an MA-level (5xxx-numbered) class called “Composition Theory,” and by implied design, I guess this means that theories of written communication and composition theory are demarcated well enough that these are two classes but not one and the same. The second sentence from the course description suggests that the class could be repeated not once, but twice, for a total of nine graduate credits. Trouble is, the class is only offered once every other year, or one time in each two-year cycle of coursework. So it hardly seems possible to repeat it even once, much less twice.
As I’m prone to doing with most classes I teach, I have been mulling over possibilities for several weeks albeit in a low-key, backburner sort of way. I notified the bookstore on Tuesday that I will not be ordering any books for the class. Instead we will sift then trace theoretical antecedents from shorter units of scholarship: 1) published articles, 2) book introductions, and 3) dissertation introductions (or first chapters). In practice, several weeks (~9) of the semester will entail reading the article or chapter along with the theoretical referent and, as such, learning to alternate similar to the way theater-goers might, between actors and props, and a cyclorama, or backdrop. Finding and following theory’s antecedent traces should, if things go well, reward us with a repertoire for theory-finding and, in turn, for theorizing. The approach is similar to the one taken in Cultural Conversations: The Presence of the Past, a textbook that I happen to be familiar with not only because I taught with it a few times but also because a professor and mentor in my MA program at UMKC, Stephen Dilks, was the book’s co-author and co-editor. Cultural Conversations laid out a two-step archeology: a historical-archival text, a contemporary uptake, and then contextualizing pieces that drew connections and filled in gaps. Our upcoming fall semester is fifteen weeks long, but some of the weeks will focus on short-form presentations, or pitches, conferences, workshopping one another’s work, and so on. The class will include weekly writing and a larger project designed in the spirit of anthologics, or assembling and introducing an album of theoretical favorites, influential and inspirational beacons for scholarly offerings students one day hope to create, whether with their own dissertations, with articles or chapters, with teaching materials, with all of it, and so on etcetera.
I want to begin the class with some consideration, together, of our experiences with theory, especially if there are any adverse reactions to theory. I am thinking here both of fear and loathing. Under what conditions, if any, has theory been scary? Are there theories that you loathe? That elicit worry? Why? Like distasteful foods, how many times would you suggest trying a theory before disqualifying it, ruling it out, casting it aside, or dismissing it altogether? This opening segment, then, points to the title of this entry. With theoroses, or something like theory’s neuroses, we might begin to parse why and to what extent theory designated as such may be offputting, difficult, time-consuming, perhaps even abruptive, steep, hazardous-seeming, or even upsetting, dare say violent. Part of this line of inquiry is meant to open up a greater awareness of our dispositions toward (or against) theory and what has formed that disposition. And part of this line of inquiry is meant to reset theory with a light-admitting aperture of possibility. If there is a third part to this line of inquiry, it rests in a few questions I don’t know the answers to yet: Must theories be named to be useful? Must theory be communicable to be useful? Can scholarship proceed with unnamed theories, and might there be any advantages in (or rationale for) shedding antecedents? Can scholarship in rhetoric and writing be theoryless?
Paired with the theoroses check-in, I want us to read Eve Tuck and C. Ree’s “A Glossary of Haunting.” The glossary is a list of keywords, and these keywords are followed by vignettes, images, and microhistories/microanalyses. The set is referential, naming other texts, but it is also personal, heeding gravity in the co-authors’ standpoints, which intersect in their collaboration but also outwardly to their respective and sometimes overlapping ways of being, knowing, and acting. So I am imagining this as an imitable text; each project (theory microanthology) will include a custom glossary of haunting and an introduction to the contents, including some engagement with the question-led threads above: fear? loathing? named? unnamed? possibilities opened? foreclosed?
Some of what I’m sorting out includes, Where to start with theory? And, How well-formed a grounding case, or object of analysis, will serve us well in coming to terms with any theory? There is of course the French critical deck with cards featuring major figures from the 1960s and 1970s. There is, alternatively, a cluster of more contemporary theorists who have given language to deleterious and destructive -isms, late Capitalism, the Anthropocene, climate collapse, globalization, and colonization and its aftermath. And, too, there are earlier models, like Stephen Pepper’s World Hypotheses: A Study in Evidence , which looks into root metaphors for formism, mechanism, organicism, and contextualism, notably nodding toward but then leaving out animism and mysticism. In yet another deck, we could have theories that direct us to consider phenomena differently still, such as with CRT, standpoint theory, intersectionality, and misogynoir, though this might also include Polanyi’s The Tacit Dimension (1966). Whichever thread I begin to work with, it pulls the others, and eventually what surfaces returns to the other part of the course title, written communication.
I would like our step-back antecendent throughlines to follow a narrowed few specific choices. Early maybes are from Alt Dis, such as Royster’s “Academic Discourses or Small Boats on a Big Sea,” stepped back to Deborah Brandt’s Literacy as Involvements (1990) or Beverly Moss’s Literacy Across Communities (1994), or Malea Powell’s “Listening to Ghosts,” stepped back to de Certau’s The Practice of Everyday Life (1984) or Harjo’s The Woman Who Fell From the Sky (1994). Another possibility is Jenny Rice’s CE article, “Para-Expertise, Tacit Knowledge, and Writing Problems” (2015) stepped back to Polanyi or to Stewart’s Ordinary Affects (2007). Another is Cynthia Haynes’ JAC article (later updated in The Homesick Phone Book (2016)), “Writing Offshore” (2003) stepped back to Worsham, “Writing Against Writing” (1991), Graff, “Hidden Intellectualism” (2001), or De Landa, “Extensive Borderlines and Intensive Borderlines” (1998). Another is Paul Prior and Jody Shipka’s “Chronotopic Lamination” (2003) stepped back to Bakhtin’s The dialogic imagination (1981) or Engeström for a check-in on CHAT. And for the book introduction step-backs, I am thinking in particular of the winner, runners-up, and perhaps a few other nominees for the RSA Book Award this year: Hsu’s Constellating Home (2022), Hawhee’s A Sense of Urgency (2023), Smilges’ Queer Silence (2022), LeMesurier’s Inscrutable Eating (2023), Detweiler’s Responsible Pedagogy (2022). And this leaves as yet-to-be gathered a small set of dissertations whose introductions and/or first chapters we’ll read similarly.
I’ll pause here, this entry vining long enough and several other to-dos lingering. But I hope to return to this, to say more about the short-form weekly writing, the intervals of pitches and workshopping, the build-ups to the larger project, which I hope will find synchrony with lead-ins to our exams process at VT. I would also like to work back to first principles, to say a bit about what I understand theory to be and do in the context of research, scholarship, teaching, and writing, both within and beyond the academy, and also to revisit the commonplace in rhetoric and composition that theorein requires practice, or application, that theory without practice is baseless, harmful, chaotic-evil, etc.
There were fields steeper than barn roofs ending in sheer cliffs, where a fall would be death. (Andean farmers do occasionally fall out of their fields.) And we continued to see herders with flocks of sheep and llamas. (23)
Wendell Berry, The Gift of Good Land: Further Essays Cultural and Agricultural (1979)
By now I have several checkmarks ✔️ and phis ɸ in the margins of Berry’s The Gift of Good Land, idiosyncratic but patterned marks distinguishing themselves over the years as the homing punctuation that give me a chance of returning and rereading. A checkmark or a phi is like a waving hand, a beckoning forefinger, and a glittering agate fieldstone combined. While reading the other morning, I was struck by these lines nodding to the sharp, impassable edges sometimes demarcating the small potato fields Berry observed and described during his visit to the northern Andes. Unto itself, it produces quite an image–to tumble, cruel gymnastikoi!, from one’s potato field. Considering my continuing strickenness with the doubling of “field” for parcel of land (field1) and semistable plane cohering shared academic inquiry (field2), the scenario of falling out got me thinking about the comparable tumble from the second type of field, the field more or less synonymous with a status quo academic discipline. Are there comparable fallings out, where someone decided, in effect, I’ve had enough of this small potatoes field!? Recent stories about leaving academia altogether cartwheel to mind, as do older examples of dismounting quietly (e.g., North, Vivion). I suppose that choosing an alt-ac path or choosing to switch fields from rhetoric-composition to English education (or whatever) is not quite the same as nose-diving over the cliff at an earthen field’s edge. And so maybe it is enough to pause with the definitional character of a field as a parcel with edges. And to think about how those edges are not necessarily on level with what is adjacent to them. Sometimes the adjacent field levels up, and sometimes down.
I’m in the third summer of living on these wonderful but rugged and moderately non-level (by Andes standards) six acres at the end of Rosemary Road. In two and a half years, I’ve only fallen twice. The first spill was two years ago, June 2022, when after transplanting a sugar maple and three or four tansies, I thought I would water them extra generously by carrying five gallon buckets of water to where I had set them in the ground. All of these new plants were plugged in along the bank running from the easement westward toward the upper shed. I’d climbed the steep slope easily enough and was five or six feet above grade, but when I started to pour the plant a long drink from the bucket, I slipped and fell on my right side, shoulder and collarbone especially screaming what the fuck is the matter with you. I was fine, but startled to be fine. The fall was teeth-clackingly jarring, all the more forceful for gravity’s hard pull not only on me but on me with a water-filled bucket in hand. The second fall was last winter break, so December 2023. Icy precipitation had glassed over the holler. When I went out in the morning to bring the chickens their food and water, I made the classic mistake of gaining my sure but shortlived footing on the grass, only to step onto the sidewalk slab near the door to the front shed where as though to a 1970s cartoon soundtrack I slipped and planted myself squarely on my back. This time, too, I was astonished not to be injured beyond having the wind knocked out of me. Doubly astonishing was that the chickens’ water didn’t spill. To imagine falling from one’s potato field is to rewind the tape on all the spills that have taken me down before, it turns out.
Longer ago, farther away, I was on what I may be misremembering as my first or second campus visit in January of my final year at Syracuse, walking along Putnam Street near the dumpster between Parking Structure 6 and Wayne State’s Maccabees Building, where the English Department is located, and unsuspecting but with slippy shoes, I caught a frozen-over puddle and whoop-whoop-whoop did an improvised Charleston move that included, miraculously, spilling my coffee into the air and, steadied by hands of winged angels, regained my balance in time to catch the floating river of scalding hot coffee back in the cup again. This goes down not as a slip and fall but as a damned close. I remember the rest of the day well because this slip sparked sharpened focus: the committee interview, the conversation with the grad director at the time, the job talk and especially the questions that followed, and then the lunch immediately after the job talk, which all of the attendees enjoyed eating as they watched Obama’s inaugural inauguration. It would have felt a bit more like opening act to the day’s headliner, except that I’d regained my balance and caught the coffee earlier that day. I don’t mean to imply that my job talk was on level with Obama’s inauguration; I only mean that at a private and personal scale, even though the after-talk questions were barbed and even though I didn’t end up getting a job offer, I was in the slip recovering and coffee catching sense having a great day.
And then there are a couple of falls on basketball courts. Courts are not fields, except when you consider Janice Lauer’s reframing of field as a kind of “epistemic court,” jurisprudentially negotiated through give and take, consensus building, etc. (granting of course that these days certain so-called high courts are not what they once were, that ‘supreme’ judgments of late have been skewing asshatted toward a politics bent on dissolving the republic). On basketball courts, I’ve fallen more times than I can count, yet two in particular are memorable because they are the only two times I have broken bones in my life. In 1990, a Highland Conference home game against the Leroy-Pine River Bucks, I intercepted an upcourt pass and lost balance, falling backward and using my left hand to break the fall and, as a consequence, fracturing my left wrist. Hurt, redness, swelling, but because it happened in the first half, and because I was the tallest player, and because Pine River had dominant bigs that year, I was encouraged to tough it out, play through the pain, be a man, and so on. I played on, suckily finishing the game even though I could hardly catch or rebound or squeeze with both hands the basketball. Many years later, older and presumably wiser, when on October 1, 2014, I similarly disrupted a long upcourt pass but landed with the tiniest of toe rolls followed by an audible pop, I hopped off the court and told my teammates I’d just broken my foot. They didn’t believe me! And sure enough, I heel-walked to the Honda Element, drove myself to the ER, and confirmed it: fractured fifth metatarsal on the right foot. Though they are not falls from fields, they are falls on courts that required eventual exits, interruptions, healing, transitions, and subsequent wayfinding.
Is the line connecting this back to the Peruvian potato fields unfollowably jaggy? Like potato fields, academic fields–as ritual, locative, material, social, and epistemic concentrations–share edges and bear out adjacencies that can be navigated, sometimes with ease and sometimes with crash or clamor. To grant fields topography opens them to a more careful review of leveling and traversals, or how cross-field movement has worked and might work differently. We can and perhaps should, every so often, run the thought experiment that asks how this field leveling has changed, how individual and collective standpoints have reshuffled. What can grow here? Who remains to carry the water, to pull weeds, to edit journals, to shepherd promotion cases? What elevations do we ascribe to the subfields in English Studies today? What elevations do we ascribe to the constitutive nominative jabberwocky ever reshuffling for rhetoric and composition/writing studies? What elevation differential are folks who tumble in or tumble out negotiating as they play chutes and ladders, this field to the next, or the next back to this? I am, for now, more interested in refreshing the old and possibly adequated (or dead) question an aid for checking up on first principles among the terms, rhetoric, composition, and writing studies, as these, too, have now become split and spliced almost as much as apple varieties and chicken breeds, to include technical writing, professional writing, scientific communication, business communication, and dozens more. Within the small potato field, it is as if each footfall has its own special, unique elevation, as if the field’s name(s) offer a stamp of dissensus so stubbornly fractal erosion, as gravity, has the final word and mountains, too, draw flat.
Writing in early summer 2024 has been an exercise in patience, haloed for session after session with a feeling that the timing is not quite right, and so the ever-reliable maxim surfaces again, “Drive according to conditions.” The timing slips because I have been fine-tuning a set of documents with a deadline next week, readying for travel to Michigan for Is.’s graduation, and lingering in that waiting place for feedback on something whose revisions can only take flight thereafter, and also waiting while waiting for go-ahead (or decline) on a chapter I proposed, anticipating a May decision. My point is, rhythms are allowed to wobble; laminar wishes swirl, betrayed by entropy. And so I chip away at other things. Mow the holler before traveling. Install a fabric dust barrier and some squirrel inhibiting hardware cloth in the side shed. Pick the season’s first black raspberries. Spritz the garden with neem oil. Turn the compost. Dab the exposed pressboard edges of a countertop a bonding agent engineered for uncooperative surfaces. Check email, but not too often. (180)
By omitting a space and setting it in a san serif font, AIlingualism piles on ambiguities. On page or screen, it might tempt you to see all lingualism, the heteroglossiac babelsong, much like Adriano Celentano’s Prisencolinensinainciusol might tempt you to hear Anglophone snippets in what is stylized nonsense. “AIlingualism” sounds like eye-lingualism, I suppose, or the act of entongued seeing, which without going into the subtleties of synesthesia might be as simple as tracing tooth-shape, fishing for an offshed hair from a bite of egg salad, or checking the odontal in-betweens for temporarily trapped foodstuff. Hull from a popcorn kernel? When did I have popcorn? A similar phenomenon would be something like “retronasal olfaction,” which Michael Pollan describes in Cooked, as the crossover between senses, the role of olfactory processing within experiences of taste, or where smell and taste commingle and coinform.
Yet I mean something altogether different with AIlingualism. Used to be the over-assisted writing revealed itself owing to too many thesaurus look-ups. You’ve betrayed a faithful expressive act because we could almost hear Peter Roget himself whispering through your words. But thesaurus overuse is a lesser crime than the wholesale substitutive “assists” that walk us nearer and nearer to overt plagiarism: patchwriting, ghost writing, essay milling, unattributed quotation, and so on. An assist from a thesaurus was usually keyed to a smaller unit of discourse, which in turn amounted to petty ventriloquism. But as the discursive magnitude increases, so too does the feeling that the utterance betrays the spirit of humanistic communication, that fleshly-terrestrial milieu where language seats, swirls, and percolates, elemental and embodied. I think this is close to what Roland Barthes characterizes as the “pact of speech” (20) in “To Write: An Intransitive Verb” (1970) from The Rustle of Language (1989).
AIlingualism creates phrasal strings from a vast reservoir of language, not the ‘Grand Vat’ but in the vaguest of terms, a large language model, or LLM, whose largesse blooms on the shoulders of other people’s language–papers, books, discussion boards, social media chatter, and utterances in whatever additional ways collected and compiled. Not that utterances have shoulders. But they do, at their genesis, stem from beings in contexts, and although the writing itself is a technology that rebodies utterances, LLMs as an extractable reserve and pseudo-sense-making melange yet further extend that rebodiment. To invent with the assistance of artificial intelligence is to compose in a way uniquely hybridized and synthetic. Language games, in this case, work by different but non-obvious rules. AIlinguals, or users of LLMs to write, suspend the pact and engage in pactless speech.
It isn’t so much the case that pactless speech of this machine-assisted sort is destined to be disappointing, underwhelming, detached from terrestrial contexts, or otherwise experientially vapid. I can’t say I am in a hurry to devote any time to reading AI writing, other than comes with the shallowest of headlines glancing. And now that we’re solidly a year and a half into this “summer” (or buzzy hot streak) of AI, it continues to hold true that most everyday people are still puzzling over what, exactly, is assisting when a writer enlists the assistance of AI. AI is as often as not fumbling along with poor customer service chat help, with returning Amazon orders, and with perfunctory Web MD advice (“Have you tried sipping chamomile tea for your sore throat, Derek?”). It is helping to offer safe-playing might-rain-but-might-not weather forecasts. Looks up; no rain. And in this sense, it still functions, albeit within my admittedly small and mostly rural lifeworld, innocuously.
In a section called “5. Creatures as Machines,” Wendell Berry puzzles out a series of questions that, though they appeared in Life Is A Miracle, which was published in 2000, might just as well have been about ChatGPT:
Is there such a thing as a mind which is merely a brain which is a machine? Would one have a mind if one had no body, or no body except for a brain (whether or not it is a machine)–if one had no sense organs, no hands, no ability to move or speak, no sensory pains or pleasures, no appetites, no bodily needs? If we grant (for the sake of argument) that such may be theoretically possible, we must concede at the same time it is not imaginable, and for the most literal of reasons: Such a mind could contain no image. (47)
Such a mind could contain no image. AIlingualism propagates pactless speech; its intelligence can generate but not contain an image. Its memory is contrived (or dependent upon contrivance), not organic, fleshly, or pulsed neurologically. This is the greatest and gravest indicator of all: still, it better than holds on. AI is ascendant, picking up steam. What can this mirror about the world we’ve built, grinding along with its paradoxically gainful backsliding, AIlingual utterances–today–amounting to no more and no less than the throat clearings, ahem ahem, of commercial science and militarism. Of all the possible energias to put to language, to sacrifice our tongues to, these? Ahem ahem ahem.
“The abstractions of science are too readily assimilable to the abstractions of industry and commerce, which see everything as interchangeable with or replaceable by something else” (41).
Strangely, since questions surfaced and circulated about chlormequat chloride in oats (and in, increasingly, in the bodies of people who have eaten those oats) a couple of weeks ago, it hasn’t been easy to find, much less to follow, that story’s diffusion. The Journal of Exposure Science & Environmental Epidemiology published the Temkin et al. article in February, and then USA Today‘s Mary Walrath-Holdridge authored and published a piece soon thereafter, “Study finds chlormequat in Cheerios and Quaker products: What to know about the pesticide.” When I mentioned in ENGL2014: Food Writing last week that I do still eat oatmeal most days for breakfast, only that I now take each spoonful with my fingers crossed, several new questions arose: What even is chlormequat? What effect is it having on mice? Why are we only just learning about this now? Is chlormequat chloride used on all oats? Just the cheap stuff? Just the stuff not otherwise labeled organic? I didn’t have many sure answers, but I said I would look into it and report back. So this is some of that; that, this. A writing teacher’s porridge, unsweetened.
Chlormequat chloride is a “growth regulator,” and something of a stalk straightening agent, as I understand it. An applied chemical, chlormequat chloride guides the oat plant (avena sativa) to an ideal form: vertical stalk, perpendicular to the earthen plane; no slouching; optimum height. The 2024 Temkin et al. article found that chlormequat chloride showed up in the urine samples taken from 77 out of 96 people (83%). Evidently, we don’t know a whole lot about the effects of chlormequat chloride on humans, but we can with a little bit of plausible extrapolation pause with concern for the what we do know about the animal studies in which chlormequat chloride does observable harm.
So while I tell myself I am eating delicious, nutritious oatmeal, I am probably eating something more like oatmeal+chlormequat chloride, or oatmeal+a pretty good chance of chlormequat chloride. I make the cross-my-fingers joke as a way to cope with these unavoidable and late-discovered, later admitted additives; it’s not like we can confirm the presence of chlormequat chloride visually, much less pick it out. Still, we must eat.
Oatmeal+chlormequat chloride, or how about we call it CC oatmeal, is merely another in a continuous stream of announcements about additives. Earlier this spring there was the cinnamon+lead recall, which I remember hearing about and wondering, how does something like that sidewind beneath notice such that we only learn about it when preschoolers begin exhibiting lead ingestion symptoms after snack. This week, Lunchables, a popular Kraft Heinz snack pack, have been in the headlines again, as Consumer Reports announced that these convenient miniature meal kits contain nearly the maximum allowable daily limits for sodium, lead, and cadmium–and this comes within a year of Lunchables ascending to the status of a bona fide lunch unto itself in the eyes of the National School Lunch Program (NSLP) guidelines.
These formulations–oatmeal+chlormequat, MTCI cinnamon+lead, and Lunchables+cadmium–are biochemical realities. The cinnamon was recalled. But the Quaker Oats and Kraft Heinz Lunchables examples elicited the predictable corporate hedges along the lines of “our products are wholesome, verified to be safe and entirely obliging of all FDA standards.” It’s a well worn path and a familiar refrain, and rather than make this about corporate (ir)responsibility, I have been thinking about it in terms of how it figures into food anxiety, insinuating doubt and causing everyday consumption habits to punctuate, as an underscore would, with uncertainty. How much should we worry about this?, was another question I heard not long ago. I don’t know. The ‘this,’ is it really only CC oatmeal for today’s breakfast? Tomorrow’s? I simultaneously understand ‘this’ as also much bigger, about food processing and industrialization, a dying planet, a broken world. I really don’t know. And can only come up with maybe we learn to grow oats again. Maybe we track down some brown sugar and a dash of fuckitol. Maybe we continue to cross our fingers.
A Meal at Google When I visited Google, I shared a silent meal with some of the people who work there. Afterward, they wrote to me and said, “Never before in that cafeteria have I had a meal that wonderful. I was so happy. I felt so peaceful. Nobody said anything in that whole room full of people. Everybody was quiet from the beginning to the end of the meal. In the history of Google, that’s the first such meal we’ve ever had.” (55)
Thich Nhat Hanh, How to Eat (2014)
I understood by mid-January that the Spring 2024 semester was probably going to rise tempestuous and run roughshod over the time I had been devoting to more regular reading and writing rhythms. It wouldn’t quite be right to say that the reading and writing went altogether dormant; it just shifted, as it is prone to doing, to other things. Even as I had a mid-January deadline for a chapter and as I was tuning plans for the classes I would teach (one a first run, the other a second run), I said “yes” to reading for a book award committee, and “maybe-could” (interpreted as yes!) to another reading-heavy committee. Both sets of reading have lit up the mix board, so to speak. It still feels good to read and read widely, to experience that silent symphony of serendipitous this paired with serendipitous that. Clicks of comprehension are oftentimes almost clicks of invention.
Yet, piled up, deadline-driven reading blankets a semester with an even deeper entrainment. Entrainment, Jenni Odell explains in Saving Time, names the exteriority of temporal regulators in a life. Too much entrainment, though, begins to feel like all of one’s time is planned for you; and so we become busy-busy, and morning noon and night governed. Asynchronous communications, such as text messaging and email, can (and oftener and oftener do, in my experience) function as entrainment reservoirs, brimmed with extras to fill in so the endo-calendar is always chock full. Administering writing programs for a decade braced me for treading again into the brittle psychosphere, a not infrequently brainfogged arena machinated by entrainments which are backed up by reserve entrainments, as when I said yes to the committees, and as when I agreed to be interim director of the PhD program.
Yet, I did say yes. Was not coerced. And I had a pretty good idea of what was ahead. The known trade-off in this is a kind of self-regulated, inevitable quietude in other areas, for example, like having less of a say here, engaging only intermittently on Facebook or Instagram, responding more slowly to texts about social engagements, drawing less, and quietly waiting for sweet flashes of downtime to consider again saying yes to anything more. Another way to approach this would be to underscore that these rebalancings of time amount to sourcing one’s own equanimity; it does little good for me or anyone in my everyday orbit to witness any apparent suffering brought on by a set of circumstances I clear-headedly agreed to.
Now that it’s April and my song is getting thin, I am taking some relief in knowing that these committees are wrapping up, and my interim term lasts only for another month or so. The last day of classes is April 30. And the reading, piled so richly high and smartly wide ranging as it is, has given me a lot to think about, including a more refined sense of possibilities for a class I am due to teach in fall.
Under the quiet, busy din of the semester, though, I have begun to understand the trade-offs in one sphere of activity dialing up, while another sphere of activity dials down, and how, throughout these adjustments–both self-set but also heavily entrained–I am perceiving the silences, lags, intervals of evident inactivity as friendly silence. A decade ago, I would have instead felt some low-level stress marked by tidal entrainment. Friendly silence (and its corollaries in composure and patience) clocks a lesson slow learned.
Mid-February scatters into stolen moments as the semester’s Week Five tides rise. There are classes to prepare and teach and observe, micro-interim administrative hand-offs to receive (push exchange yields soon thereafter to pull exchange), and a pair of stout reading lists for different awards and recognitions. The hours hand waves in its dinky circles, hello-good-bye, hello-good-bye, again, though time’s passing isn’t so much doldrum-thrum as labored, more-so than usual, for three fitfully stacked oncoming weeks.
Duty-whines aside, in and among those stolen moments, I am provisionally sizing up and laying out interlocking puzzle pieces toward a conversation and workshop session I’m due to lead in April with the Food Studies group, framed primarily by the question, “Is Food Studies a Discipline?” Provisional intuition says that it is not, or, rather, that where the Food Studies label circulates and sits, there are semi-baked artisanal cracker crumbs and runaway shreds of cheese that only almost made it into the pimento cheese, but there is not as of right now any large-scale organizing will of the sort that a cohering and widely shared theory would be useful for. I could be wrong! Depending upon how long cast is the shadow of this disciplinarity question, it’s early, and I am an interloper in that my own engagements with Food Studies are recent and probably naive, as such. Nevertheless, this question is intriguing enough to me to follow for a while. To engage it further, I have checked adjacencies (as a bowler needing bumpers might do) with Visual Studies and Writing Studies. I mean that because Visual Studies and Writing Studies have, each in their own time, rallied a not insignificant measure of attention and energy at their own disciplinarity questions, there are cross-checks and angles by which to compare, albeit lightly and with due consideration of all the ways such comparisons become complicated.
Approximately a decade ago, with the publication of Farewell to Visual Studies (Penn State UP, 2015), James Elkins sent into circulation an adapted version of an introductory lecture from 2011. The short piece consists of two elaborated lists, a list of farewells to unfulfilled promises (“Farewells”), and a list of “things [he’d] like[d] to see visual studies become.” Returning to the question I am considering, as a Rhetoric and Composition/Writing Studies academic transposing the disciplinarity question now onto Food Studies, I’ll post Elkins’ list once as it appears in Farewell to Visual Studies, and again with modifications posed as a rerig for Writing Studies and Food Studies.
List of farewells for Visual Studies (Elkins):
Visual studies should be harder to do.
Visual studies continues to depend on a relatively small, fairly fixed set of theorists.
Visual studies continues to look mainly at modern and contemporary visualities.
List of farewells rerigged for Writing Studies:
Writing studies should be harder to do.
Writing studies continues to depend on a relatively small, fairly fixed set of theorists.
Writing studies continues to look mainly at modern and contemporary composing practices and compositions.
List of farewells rerigged for Food Studies:
Food studies should be harder to do.
Food studies continues to depend on a relatively small, fairly fixed set of theorists.
Food studies continues to look mainly at modern and contemporary foods.
List of absences for Visual Studies (Elkins):
Images need to start arguing.
Visual studies needs to make more adequate use of its images.
Visual studies needs conversations about its own history.
Visual studies shouldn’t bypass non-art images and scientific images.
Visual studies should be engaged with the phenomenology of the making of images: like art history, it has yet to think seriously about what kinds of knowledge can come from the making of art.
Visual studies needs to resolve the unclarities of its politics.
Visual studies is confused about ideological critique.
List of absences rerigged for Writing Studies:
Writing needs to start arguing.
Writing studies needs to make more adequate use of its texts.
Writing studies needs conversations about its own history.
Writing studies shouldn’t bypass non-creative writing and scientific writing.
Writing studies should be engaged with the phenomenology of the doing of writing: like media history, it has yet to think seriously about what kinds of knowledge can come from the doing of writing.
Writing studies needs to resolve the unclarities of its politics.
Writing studies is confused about ideological critique.
List of absences rerigged for Food Studies:
Foodstuffs need to start arguing.
Food studies needs to make more adequate use of its dishes.
Food studies needs conversations about its own history.
Food studies shouldn’t bypass non-culinary foods and scientific treatments of food.
Food studies should be engaged with the phenomenology of the making and eating of food: like culinary history, it has yet to think seriously about what kinds of knowledge can come from the making and eating of food.
Food studies needs to resolve the unclarities of its politics.
Food studies is confused about ideological critique.
In each list for Writing Studies and Food Studies, I have boldfaced the rerigged lines that seem to me to be worthy of entertaining, even momentarily, and I have italicized the lines that suggest instead a hint (or greater) of dissonance, surfacing a quality or condition that just doesn’t quite seem congruous with the network of activities and materials that correspond with the named field of study (albeit from my own small, humble, and unavoidably limited standpoint).
Having stepped through the exercise, it leaves me with doubts about whether it generates much in the way of new insight or possibility. Might not be map to follow if we want to venture farther into the maze. Heck, it does more in service of recalling the questions about what it means for Visual Studies to have given up the ghost, so to speak (coincidentally? not conincidentally? at the same moment when Visual Rhetoric was still gaining curricular and researcherly traction, almost as if Visual Rhetoric, even if it did not get big time sustaining uptake in any of the field’s prominent organizations or journals, was untroubled by the overtures about Visual Studies’ end). And so the light turns green on the EMF meter, but I don’t know if it blinkers toward anything significant for these other two pairings, writing and food.
I don’t know yet whether I will return to Elkins’ lists or make new lists of my own for the April workshop. I am thinking that I might instead switch to an approach influenced by Steven Mailloux’s 2000 RSQ article, “Disciplinary Identities: On the Rhetorical Paths between English and Communication Studies,” where he cited Janet Emig’s 1982 CCC article, “Inquiry Paradigms and Writing.” Here’s that long excerpt from Mailloux, citing Emig:
The changed rhetorical conditions of disciplinary formation become strikingly evident in the 1982 volume of College Composition and Communication. The February issue alone contains Janet Emig’s “Inquiry Paradigms and Writing” and Maxine Hairston’s “The Winds of Change: Thomas Kuhn and the Revolution in the Teaching of Writing,” as well as reviews of rhetoric and composition collections that refer explicitly to disciplinary paradigms.’ Addressing her fellow researchers in composition studies, Emig argues that “our responses concerning the nature, organization, and evaluation of evidence reveal our inquiry paradigms, both those we elect to inhabit, and those we may even help to create” (64). She then goes on to elaborate the most important characteristics of an inquiry paradigm:
1) a governing gaze [a steady way of perceiving actuality]; 2) an acknowledged, or at least a conscious, set of assumptions, preferably connected with 3) a coherent theory or theories; 4) an allegiance to an explicit or at least a tacit intellectual tradition; and 5) an adequate methodology including an indigenous logic consonant with all of the above. (65)
Emig demonstrates how these characteristics inform disciplinary research into writing and how such phenomenological and ethnographic paradigms contrast with traditional positivistic paradigms, which sometimes are “simply, globally, and, of course, mistakenly” identified with “The Scientific Method.” Not only does Emig cite Kuhn in explaining her notion of “paradigm,” but she also clearly distances composition from traditional notions of science out of which came the scientific rhetoric used by teachers of public speaking earlier in the century.
The phrase “inquiry paradigm” rings nimbler than “discipline,” in part because inquiry paradigms haven’t imposed their ordering functions so deeply into the higher ed org charts (i.e., stabilizing, yes, but also overdetermining to the point of entrenchment in many cases the delineations walling off common questions by walling off departments and programs), and so it may turn out to be a better choice for inviting engagement on the question(s) about Food Studies and what, if anything, coheres its domain of activity. The governing gaze can refer, simply, to an in-common-ish attention structure sufficient for cooperative guidance (and corresponding leadership). Each of the other criteria–set of assumptions, coherent theories, an intellectual tradition, and an adequate methodology–steer me more toward uncertainty and less toward crisp, identifiable anchors, whether the ponderables are posed for visuality, food, or writing.
For this preliminary go-round, I’ll let this end with a ‘good enough’ nod; it’s gotten me thinking in ways I wasn’t before. Nothing conclusive, not yet. Senses of new and reshaped possibilities. And there is time, pocketed in dips and dives intermittent throughout the next couple of weeks, yet with sufficient momentum that I can pick these ideas up again with the goal of chilling the aspic for setting it more firmly by mid-late March.
Food Writing preparations for Thursday’s class session sidewinded unexpectedly to Agriculture Canada’s 1970 (revised) volume, Methods for Sensory Evaluation of Food. The small internet-archived book has just 64 pages, and most of them provide models for Likert ratings and corresponding statistical lookups so as to go easy on calculator-keying. Especially telling about the book’s time and place are selection of foods features in the examples: peaches, “fish-potato flakes processed under two different sets of conditions” (16), and, here, “three samples of goose meat” (30).
I don’t think I want to go the meandering long-haul distance on this one; it’s too tangential to our focus on whether and to what extent, if so, food evaluation is plausibly indexical, relatable from one person to the next, communicable, and so on.
Without venturing too far into the numbers, I want to pose as a methodical backdrop categories of appearance/aesthetics, aroma/scent, taste, texture and consistency, temperature, and overall flavor, which I understand to be a more integrated and holistic sensory impression, whereupon each becomes inflected with the other (much of which I have adapted from sites like this). From this context, we have a system of a certain sort, and yet, this is meant to provide an antecedent for the more active and applied part of the class, which will include sampling an apple, mandarin orange, or banana, listening again to “Are You Really Appreciating the Apple? from Savor, and “Eating an Orange” from A Pebble for Your Pocket, and then, through writing and conversation, engaging reflectively on the relationship between experiential knowledges and the techniques, associated with mindfulness, in this case, for granting greater (or is it simpler, if intensified) saturation to the sensorium, while eating. I know, I know, 99 word sentence. Blog forgive me. I am mulling over the contrastive frames for experiential transposition, and that sets up promisingly in this first model, assigning ratings to discrete qualities, as compared to the mindfulness meditation that invites spacetime flux, the cosmos in a bite of tender goose meat, or GMO fruit, as the case may be.
