Day Six: Technology in the Age of Irony

First article today – Hassan’s Towards a Concept of Postmodernism. Actually we started with an Oulipo exercise in which the students had to “rewrite” a sentence with all the vowels removed. I love the idea of creating arbitrary rules or restrictions to work within. We discussed that as a technique or tactic for developing artists – something to help you see things a different way when stagnation sets in. 

The conversation about the article went really well in both classes. Having completed two projects before the article gave them something to think about in connection with Hassan’s observations. I can see a bit farther down the road since I know what examples we will see later, so there is a kind of looped quality to the class where we move forward by reflecting on where we have been. I have never been they type of teacher to call on students for information – I figure if they want to offer it – fine. The projects are a way of getting around this since each student is “called upon” for the presentation. But with this class I thought I would try something a bit different. We started the conversation with each student identifying one idea, word, question, comment, etc they derived form the reading. I realize that this doesn’t necessarily mean that everyone read it, but even scanning the text to pull an idea out opens up the space of conversation. 

I really need to work on removing myself from the center of the conversation. Even though I ask for student input, which foregrounds questions and ideas that I didn’t necessarily have about the article, I then end up weaving it all into what I had planned to say. Perhaps this is the class where I abandon writing notes out for everything and just listen to see where the conversation ins headed.

Two subjects that I had not anticipated were contemporary technology and irony. Although the subject of the course is “postmodernity,” I feel that what we are really trying to get a handle on as what factors contributed to the development of the society we now live in. I love the notion of a palimpsest in which you can look at different layers of history at the same time. With the technology we now have this is possible in ways previous eras could never have fathomed. Virtually all of human history can be accessed in an immediate way. With all of this at your fingertips the question then becomes – what do you do with it?

A number of students commented on the fact that fashion, style, music, etc seems to come and go with extreme quickness. Its not just the ADD mindset, but the fact that the technology allows that. It’s the point that Reynolds makes in Retromania about the accessibility of music. Rather than tracking down sounds in a “shop” a few keystrokes and the entire history of a genre is now available. His point is “the impetus behind record collecting used to be: ‘I want to have something that no one else has.’ But with the advent of sharity that’s shifted to ‘I’ve just got hold of something no one else has got, so I’m immediately going to make it available to EVERYBODY” (106). I must admit that my search for ever more exotic and hard to find books and sounds is driven by the initial impetus, but facilitated by the second.

And so it is no wonder that irony has become a cultural disposition of choice. Is there any other way to approach this wealth of material. One need not be discerning if everything is at your disposal. How else can a generation process this much information critically without taking an ironic stance, which allows one to be engaged and disengaged simultaneously. I keep referencing the film Sid and Nancy since I seem to remember something about irony. I could be totally mistaken – I think the quote is “are you being sarcastic? Yes. No. I don’t know anymore.” Somewhere there is an article about Punks VS Hipsters and the ironic reinvention of sarcasm.

So – I was actually trilled with the conversation today – wanted it to develop farther. In future on days like this perhaps I will step back a bit and observe as opposed to trying to drive the conversation in a particular direction. 

Day Five: Not an earth-shattering day, but I know that without time to process and discuss the projects they remain isolated ideas

Catch up days after projects are always interesting. I like the flexibility of having an open day with nothing planned, but then always have the concern that we won’t have enough to talk about. We stared with an exercise in recontextualization. Breaking into 4 groups I gave each group a list of 7 quotations – each group got the same list. They then decided what to do with the list – between the two classes there were 8 totally different responses. In a gesture to meta-pedagogy I spent some time talking about why we start with these type of exercises. Engage the mind, collaboration, think on your feet, see the other responses, and finally some linkage to the day’s discussion.

Although I still feel like we are still in “exposition” mode in the sense that we are gathering information on modernism and postmodernism, the opening exercise was geared toward the same kind of recontextualization that we saw in the second project. I started the conversation by asking the students about the difference between the first two projects. Differences are easy in that one aimed for a discussion of unity and the other was designed to present fragments. The answer to the question – “could you explore the second projects with the list from the first?” was not what I had expected. The upshot was a conversation about how we as humans can rationalize just about anything. So – as the first project seemed to be about defending or at least explaining how the example fit the criteria and this approach could easily be applied to the second more fragmented projects.

I do find that in asking certain questions that I have an agenda – a list of terms, ideas, etc to cover. I am working at trying to phrase questions that require more thought than simply “yes” or “no.” But, this means that I may have no idea where the answer will take us. The process of structuring the conversation works like a feedback loop in which answers determine direction which determines questions and then back to answers. It would have been impossible to teach this way at the start of my career, I just wouldn’t have enough examples to draw on to weave into the conversation. Like most teachers I suspect that I come back to a set group of examples, any student that has taken more than one class with me can see this, but there are often augment by new material brought in by the students.

In these first few weeks I am trying to establish terms and ideas that we will later explore in more depth. So far we have discussed text, defamiliarization, juxtaposition, and now today the “play of meaning.” The point with this is to discuss the interplay of fragments in the second project and, how, without an argument or explanation, slippage between meanings is possible. As these become foundational ideas in turning more specifically to postmodern I asked what kind of culture produces those techniques. This lead to a conversation about technology and the accessibility of information. Quite literally this era has access to information from all other eras – instantaneously – not something that could be said of the past. Here I linked these ideas to Simon Reynolds’ book Retromania. Not an earth-shattering day, but I know that without time to process and discuss the projects they remain isolated ideas. The goal is to begin to shape them into something more connected.  The next class we dive into the first reading – Ihab Hassan’s classic essay “Toward a Concept of Postmodernism.”  

Day Four: More and more I am starting to trust the process

One of the things that I find difficult about teaching project based courses is that I constantly second guess the assignments. I find that I really don’t do this if I am lecturing or even leading a discussion on articles or plays. But, by asking open ended questions I really need to be prepared for what ever answers come out. So – generally – the night before the projects are due I lay awake and think – was this an appropriate question? What will the students get out of answering it? How will I keep them occupied and thinking about the course material for the full class period? Will we have enough time to look at and discuss all the projects? But more and more I am starting to trust the process. I have yet to be disappointed with the outcome – and this is over four classes and probably somewhere in the vicinity of 20 projects. What attracts me to these kinds of questions for material like generative art, postmodernism, aesthetics of dissonance, and chaos theory is that the subjects are about ideas – not facts, not skill, not mastery, but ideas.

So – for this project students were asked to place two or more pieces (any medium) in proximity so that the pieces comment on each other. The point of the project is to begin to engage in a conversation about fragments, quotations, juxtaposition, reappropriation, disharmony. Its hard to get that all in in one project, but it raises certain questions that can be addressed later in the term.

As I have mentioned a number of times in class – what is important about these projects is not only that the student engage in the process of answering the question, but that they are able to see about 19 other answers to the same question. As expected – some projects seemed simple – a basic juxtaposition between objects – but when we began to tease out some of the implications of this juxtaposition even the simplest projects seem far more complex. I would love to teach a class of about 10 – then we would have enough time to dive into the process behind each project. With 20 that is just not possible. I have no idea how I managed 30 last year. The e-portfolio is a potential solution to this, but that really depends on the student.

What I love about assignments like this is that it is often difficult to tell what is intended as a project and what is simply a pile of things just strewn about the room. It does raise the issue of intent as well as frame of mind. There were a number of pieces where I simply couldn’t tell if they were student projects or not. It forced me to reevaluate what it was I was looking at. In a very phenomenological way it caused me to bracket my assumptions until I could figure out one way or the other. At times I really couldn’t. It will be interesting to review the student posts on their e-portfolios and see if I missed anything or over interpreted anything.

Disclaimer: My intent with this blog is not to name names, but some projects I really do need to talk about because they sparked an interesting conversation or thought process. It doesn’t mean I value other projects less, it is just these specific projects sparked something.

One of the projects in the first section caught my eye primarily because of the student’s reticence to show it to the class. The juxtaposition of Obama’s speech post Newtown shootings with a laugh track. Yes – it sounds jarring – and it was – but not necessarily for the reasons I initially thought. Created between these two pieces was a tremendous amount of tension. It also opened up a space of play in which the viewer is left to decipher the meaning. Talking with the class it was clear that reactions were widely varied. There was a similar reaction to the presentation of a swastika as a unified, linear, beautiful object for project 1. It clearly points out the power of images like this, but also of the range of possible meanings once you get past the initial reaction.  

The second section yielded an interesting discussion about a mask that was propped up by an iphone. The student initially claimed that the phone was not part of the piece – and yet – for most of the viewers – it clearly was. This was a great space to begin to explore the idea of context as well as indeterminacy. We make choices everyday and often do not think about the implications of those choices or possible readings of them. Most of my arts training has been to close down those possibilities by making specific choices. But, even then there is a flexibility of meaning. This also opened a space to begin to discuss the notion of “text” in a postmodern way. Students discussed “reading” these objects, scanning them, interacting with them, searching for meaning or meanings. Many of the projects were as dense as a novel.

Next – a free day to decompress from the projects and review them.  I have a list of questions to pose. We will see where it takes us. 

Day Three: “why don’t you read the way I write.”

I know I say this after every project, but I am always impressed with what students bring in, mainly because they raise issues and ideas that I would never think of. The beauty of asking open-ended questions is that they leave room for very creative approaches. Today’s assignment was to bring in something that represented the list of “modernist” terms I had handed out (universal, complete, determined, unified, balanced, orderly, linear, logical, beautiful). It was interesting to see what a wide range of things these terms could be applied to. As I still work to understand how project based courses function I realize that I could easily have assigned the students a reading that dealt with these issues. The drawback to the reading is that it is hard to ascertain if everyone has done the reading, and typically students are only exposed to one way of looking at the ideas (the author’s or the teacher’s). By having each student talk about these ideas in relation to what they are presenting we now have 20-something takes on these ideas.

The other benefit to this process is that students have a more personal understanding of the material. Even if they choose to talk about something that they are disengaged with the act of dissecting it with the given criteria forces them to be more introspective – especially when they are standing in front of 20 or so colleagues. That is also a dynamic of this opening project – they have to stand up in front of others and talk. We do it right up front – get it out of the way – so we can move on. I know that in order to get students to the point where they are willing to do some interesting and creative work we have to find a space that is comfortable. The exercises and warm up at the start of most classes serve the same purpose. Basically, we need to get to know each other – which may take 6 or 7 weeks.

Part of what I need to work on is to engage the students in a conversation about what ideas or presentations made an impact on them. I am really not interested in engaging in a conversation of good and bad or successful or unsuccessful, but talk about what is engaging. What ideas they came back to. What images or sounds or ideas stuck in their minds. The hard part for me is moving between the two sections – which actually had two totally different trajectories. So I may need to remind myself who presented what in which section. They have another project due on Tuesday – which is basically the opposite of the question I asked them for today. The class following that one is wide open, so it will be a nice cap to the end of the second week to be able to reflect back on two completely different projects.

The one question I posed today which I need to come back to is how this “modernist” list corresponds to the method or process they are learning at UNCSA. The intent is not to criticize, but to open a space for a conversation about learned modes of perception. This typically plays out in an examination of art works with a framework of expectation built in. And again I return to Gertrude Stein’s beautiful statement – “why don’t you read the way I write.” Sometimes writing is “universal” and “balanced” and sometimes it is non-linear and fragmented. 

Day Two: I need to talk less and listen more

Students entered to the repetitive sounds of Laurie Anderson’s “Language is a Virus.” I do try and match the sounds at the start of class to topic (or one of the topics) for the day. I know the connections, but I suppose I should ask the students to begin to think about this. I did feel compelled to show the Family Guy clip mainly cause I felt it worked to deflate the rather oppressive start of day one. Since postmodernism raises questions about the fallibility of authority it is hard to teach this class without at least questioning my own.

So – then we warmed up and I gave the students a group project focused on language. I realized in going back over the book they are reading on postmodernism that it includes quite a few theory ideas (semiotics, deconstruction, Foucault, Baudrillard, etc). Reading about this is one thing, but if we can use the opening fifteen minutes or so to do an exercise on these ideas I feel that the students will have a greater understanding of them. Today, for example, I wanted to talk about semiotics and signs. So – I broke the students into four groups and have them four words to define: Red, Game, and Meaning. It is always interesting to see what each group comes up with and what elements are similar and where they differ. Great spinning out of these words to deal with images, emotions, ideas, etc. I then made a list of how they defined these three words and suggested that they now needed to define all these other words.

The whole point with this was to explore the deferring quality of language. That is, it is hard to pin things down with words since meaning can often be very slippery. I then got into teacher mode and talked about Wittgenstein’s notion that to imagine a language is to imagine a way of life, Saussure breakdown of a sign into signifier and signified, and finally Derrida’s idea of Différance. A lot to throw at the students the first few days.

We then moved to discuss the starting points for all of the P2P classes. LeeAnna’s on the concentration camp always yields good conversation, but there were great crossover points between that and Mike’s grid, Kry’s rulers and people, Janna’s uncertainty, and Betsy’s football lists. I asked questions, but I probably railroaded though my ideas more strongly than I should have. I know that, particularly with this subject, it will be a struggle all term between just telling the students things and letting them come up with the answers themselves. I need to find a way to be more of a guide and less of an “authoritative” voice on the subject. Yes – I could spend the whole term explaining postmodernism to them, but they have lived it so I would much rather hear what they have to say. For example, I loved the connection in the first section between the grid and how grocery stores are laid out. I never would have made that connection.

With changes in the syllabus to accommodate a meeting in Chapel Hill the students have two projects to execute back to back. The first – due Thursday – is basically a show n’ tell on something that fits a list of modernist criteria. The second, due next Tuesday, asks the students to place two or more pieces in proximity so that the pieces comment on each other. The example I tossed out was how Duchamp’s urinal recontextualizes the museum as well as the art within it. This space also works to “legitimize” Duchamp’s readymade as a “work of art.” Here is hoping I talk less in the next two classes and listen more. 

Day One: The Rules of the Game

I find it interesting that in a class where I would like to foster an open environment to encourage creativity I open by being such a jerk. A whole list of “if you don’t want to do this, this or this, then get out of this class.” Part of this is driven by having taught in this project based way in the past and having students in class who really don’t want to be there or don’t want to work in the way I am asking them to work. I really do love posing question that I have no answer for, but I can see that for some people this is very frustrating. Especially if they are used to an educational model that judges them on how correct their answers are.

I think the main thing I want to avoid is students thinking that this class will be easier then other classes since I am less interested in using grades as punishment (or reward) and more interested in the work produced. I tried to impress upon both sections of the class that I am giving up a good chunk of my authority and my position as arbiter to the class. This places the students into a position where their input, comments, ideas, etc are just as valid as mine. But, it means wanting to take on that responsibility. What I mean by this is that a collective mind is really only as strong as the whole – a whole created through the energies of all involved. Disengaged minds means that the collective is weaker than if it is constructed with engaged minds. So – Day one ends up being mostly about the rules of the game.

After monologing about the syllabus, requirements, expectations, etc we got to the fun stuff. We went through Debbie’s warm up exercise – which I have really grown to love. Yes it feels odd, and sometimes it would just be easier to just cut to the material for the day, but I really do enjoy the decompression time from one activity to the next. Taking a few minutes to stretch out and then play a game provides that window of transition. It also functions as a group activity since we do these tings as a group. I still haven’t hit on a good first day game yet though. We played “what is inside” today with a tin filled with objects that rattled. The point was to imagine what these objects might be – with no reality restrictions. Theoretically these objects could be anything. But we do tend to circle around the possible. The answers to this question are individual and so I feel like we need to do small group exercises next class since there is safety in numbers.

The warm up and game gave way to sharing names, area of study and something unique or interesting. The hope is that by the point the class is engaged, or at least more awake than when we started. Next we generated the list of Self, Society, and Cosmos terms and ideas. The list was not radically different from last year for the Aesthetics of Dissonance class, but exploring it through the postmodern frame revealed a lot of sort of mater narrative grand scheme unifying ideas. Since Postmodernism challenges these ideas this was a great place to start this class.

I know that in having taught this way in the past it will take us some time to get acquainted with each other. The hard part is getting students to the point where they are willing to take a chance on a project without having to be concerned with grades or judgment. It is at this point where I think we can get some real work done. So – we will see how things develop.

Of course, in retrospect, rather than prattle on about the structure of the class I could have just shown the students this video.

Teaching Postmodernism in the – um – age of Postmodernism or how Cool Hand Luke has affected my ideas on authority.

When I think back on it I think that my first role model was Cool Hand Luke. A fantastic anti-authoritarian character brought to life by the impish grinning Paul Newman. I clearly remember seeing this film on TV some time in the fourth grade. I suspect I have a class journal somewhere where I rave about the film, although this may be a constructed memory. In any case, as a role model he embodied the idea of flouting any and all authority. He attacks capitalism by cutting the heads off of parking meters; family in the heartbreaking scene in the back of a pick-up truck; arbitrary authority as deliciously portrayed in Strother Martin’s “what we have here is a failure to comun'cate” by not being broken by the system; and finally the big man upstairs when Luke shouts “Let me know you're up there. Come on. Love me, hate me, kill me, anything. Just let me know it.” Faced with silence he concludes “I'm just standin' in the rain talkin' to myself.” Clearly Luke dwelled in a post-Nietzsche world. He is a hero who chooses not to be one.  I like to interpret the moment near the end of the film with Luke standing before a window a choice to be taken out by the sniper’s bullet rather than acquiesce to authority and imprisonment. But Luke understood that this was a solitary, individual choice and not one to be slavishly imitated when he shouts at the other prisoners after another failed escape attempt to “Get out there yourself. Stop feedin' off me.” But they didn’t get it and spend the final moments of the film mythologizing the now Christ-like Luke. So – in a way – not only is he my first role model, but my first anti-role model as well. The anti-hero hero. How postmodern.

I have been thinking about his flouting of authority mainly because I am gearing up to teach a class on postmodernism in which I know I need to find a way to flout my own authority. I, like many teachers of my generation, came of age when theory abounded and the “academy” seemed to be on the verge of change. We were among the first to learn from and teach such things as graphic novels, video games, pop music, TV, and B movies – exalting the lessons and complexities of these genres the way preceding generations talked about Shakespeare and Eliot and Joyce. So, in some way I guess I saw embracing pop culture as rebellious, as anti-authority, as representing some kind of change. But then many of us got absorbed into the academy. We became teachers and (gasp) administrators, scholars, authors, and “authorities.” Our exaltation of pop culture as dreary and depressing as the previous generation’s lauding of the “classics.”

So here I am, an “authority” who despises authority, especially my own, getting ready to teach a class on a subject that fostered a supreme distrust of authority, especially in me. I have to admit that part of me is fascinated by this conundrum, until I realize that thinking this way and acting this way is the difference between looking at an Escher drawing and then trying to walk in it. So, in structuring this class I find I will be tinkering with when and where my authority is asserted and when it is deliberately marginalized. Of course deliberately marginalizing my own authority is ultimately an authoritative act. So – I need accomplices in this gesture – which is where the students come in. Part of the deal on the first day is to see if they want to play this game, after all, it is far easier just to sit in the back of a classroom and regurgitate what is said by the teacher than taking on a bit of that role yourself.

The hard part is trying to create a level playing field in which I am not the only one in charge. This is not a new thing, since I have developed a number of strategies over the years to do this. My favorite, employed last spring for a class on the aesthetics of dissonance, is simply to fade way. As the class progresses I do what I can to remove myself from the proceedings, to the point where I basically set a class in motion and leave the room allowing whatever to happen to happen. Some students step forward, asserting their own authority, but as a student among students they truly are on even ground. Students that use these moments for an open exchange of ideas are probably the right students for this type of method. Students that see the removal of authority as a means of escape probably don’t get much out of this structure. My hope is to make this clear on day one. I find that while this type of gesture works when the subject is the avant-garde - akin to the Situationionist’s idea of lighting the cultural fuse but refusing to deal with the detonation - it seems like a cop-out when approaching the postmodern ideas that developed in the wake of the avant-garde. In many ways this class is in response to the previous class – which really only I and perhaps one or two students will see.

So – I suspect I will hang around for all of this class, but work to create a space where I am not “in charge” or seen as the “judge,” or the “authority.” Hard to do within a system that demands feedback and grades. The trick is to get the students to stop looking at the grades as some sort of validation or punishment. The deal with this class is the same deal with all classes – show up, do the work to the best of your ability, engage in class discussions, execute the projects on time, and you will do fine. Probably easier said than done. My intent is to track the development of this course and these ideas here.