Questioning Collection
Interrogating the Ethics of Composition as Collection in the First-Year Writing Classroom
Will Kurlinkus The Ohio State University
The collection of pack ratswithout seriality, without relation to one another or to the context of acquisition Susan Stewart
Late Capitalist Collection Exigencies
Rapid growth in knowledge not only makes products obsolete, but also means that human capital depreciates quickly. Constantly subject to depreciation, workers must expect to continually retool their skills or risk having nothing of value to market to [Link] living postindustrial lives people constantly move along a continuum between skilled and unskilled. The position is never stable. Tony Scott, Writing Work, Technology, and Pedagogy in the Era of Late Capitalism
2010 Conference on College Composition and Communication Call for Proposals
Whether its taking the old and making it fresh and new or taking the current and giving it a different spin, to remix a thing is to try and make it better. In our 61st year, after decades of innovative teaching and cutting-edge scholarship, the CCCC remix provides us with a way to revisit, rethink, revise, and renew our vision for the future of our field. The remix is not only about knowing what works but also being forward thinking enough to imagine new combinations and collaborations. Keeping the elements of the remix in mind, I encourage you to look closely at our field and figure out the spaces where we can make new connections, the spaces where we can flip something new. (CCCC)
Models of Composition as Collection
Romantic Authorship Benjamin s Flaneur
Collection
Creative Commons
Romantic Collection
LeviStrausss Bricoleur
Gathering of Souvenirs
Cultural Appropriation
Invention as Wonder
A collection of interesting, powerful [Link]-bite apercus that sound good by themselves but can also become workable bits in a larger structure.A compelling genre with which to re-arrange textual materialsboth original and appropriatedin order to have those materials speak the students own voice and concerns Comp Theorist Geoffrey Sirc Materials are unoriginal, then, chosen on the basis of exoticism and strong interest (Sirc).
Taking an art stance on the everyday (Sirc).
Duchamps The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even
Questioning Wonder
Walter Benjamins Flaneur: the privileged wanderer of the 19th Century Paris arcades. This elite observer has the time to roam the city, reveling in commodity culture and the innocent lives of the crowd while always retaining a critical distance from it: He becomes deeply involved with them, only to relegate them to oblivion with a single glance of contempt. There is something compelling about the ambivalence where he cautiously admits to it (Benjamin).
Collection as Slumming?
One dilettante, a prince of his profession Thinks Black Belt is a mine of finest ore, Pure gold and bronze and copper to explore, Desires, enamored of his own observation, To write it up, a nice romantic story, Of leopards loitering along the stereo, And jungle maidens, sensuous and sweet, Crowning the Black belt in their sable glory.
From Claude McKays Black Belt Slummers
The Gathering of Souvenirs
From Susan Stewarts On Longing
The whole dissolves into the parts. Metonymic Diachronic The souvenir involves displacement of attention to the past. The souvenir is not simply an object appearing out of context, an object from the past incongruously surviving in the present;; rather, its function is to envelop the present within the past. Two types of souvenir: 1. Souvenirs of external sights 2. Souvenirs of individual experience
The Collection
From Susan Stewarts On Longing
The collection seeks a form of self-enclosure which is possible because of its ahistoricism. Asynchronous Metaphorical The collection replaces history with classification. Once the object is completely severed from its origin, it is possible to generate a new series, to start again within a context that is framed by the selectivity of the collector. The ultimate term in the series that marks the collection is the self, the articulation of the collectors own identity.
Literacies of Wonder
We must teach the maintenance of the original contextcurration rather than appropriation. We must teach our students to interrogate what drove them to collect what they didwhat drives their wonder and how that wonder reframes the objects they collect. If identity politics is an attempt to thematize the other in terms of its similarities to the self, I am interested here in constructing an ethical alterity politics that considers identity as beholden and responsive first and foremost to the other Jeffrey Nealon
Screenshot from the Currators Code <[Link]> a site that is a good first step towards practices and attitudes of digital attribution.
Questioning Wonder
Thinking about composition as collection should also always involve thinking about the lists of interests and identifications that propel our students to collect certain objects/data/experiences and not others. Collectors like the Grimms, who ostensibly collected folk culture as a rebellion against high art and the Enlightenment, didnt consider every piece of culture or person interesting; the collection had to contain only the certain type of pure representation the collectors sought. Thus, The people are not the mob of the streets, who never sing or compose but shriek and mutilate. The people, the folk, were not then, the non-exotic lower classes of the city because they didnt match the collectors ideal search exigence.
The Freedom of the Commons
Lawrence Lessigs Free Cultures: Cultures that leave a great deal open for others to build upon. If it is truly impossible to escape the influence of the mass media, we should be able to respond to it in any productive (and responsible) way we see fit, shifting our relationship from a passive reception model to one where we produce. The bricoleur doesnt collect his repertoire in order to merely solve one task (like the completion of a final paper); he learns to use each element of the repertoire adaptively for multiple tasks. This type of adaptable repertoire is invaluable, I think, to teach our students.
Questioning the Commons
What pieces of culture are up for grabs in a model of composition that touts the cultural commons? And whom are we trying to help by grabbing them? Remix Culture sometimes creates a false share or be greedy dichotomy and a command to share. We like to take new examples but not new theory and new ways of readingdiscovering interesting content in the name of our fields away from the literacies that were traditionally used to engage that content. We need new models of citation and attribution because in our current system representing collective authorship is very very very hard.
Questioning the Commons
Not everyone has equal access to the commons: Individual creators are privileged even as they build on knowledge, act from the past, and worked from biased (not neutral) technologies. Should we perpetuate the logic that race, gender, and class arent part of the digital commons? Kimberly Christen
Conclusions
Collection is a social and political act; there are no mere disembodied facts, but [Link] Johnson-Eilola. Which engines drive our wonder? What is the difference between collecting, curating, and appropriating? What role should both pluralistic and singular models of authorship play in our classrooms? What role does our writing play in a knowledge but also commodity economy and how are we helping or harming our subjects?