Naming things: make it/love work

When I first started thinking that I should start blogging, I got excited about coming up with a name for the blog. This is just the most recent instance of a constant stupidity.

When was in middle school and high school and I wanted to be in a band, my favorite thing to do was to think of band names. I think I mistook this for an interest in music… or, worse, I mis-equated my ability to come up with band names and my actual musical ability. Similarly, when I was in college and grad school and wanted to be an academic, my favorite thing to do was think of names for articles, conference papers, and other pieces of academic writing. At least for a time, I DEFINITELY confused thinking of titles with actually doing research and writing.

A few weeks ago, when I decided to start this blog, I came up with what I thought were a few good names. Then, by the time I got around to actually getting a wordpress account, I couldn’t remember any of the names I thought of.

The current title, “Bleep,” is a word with a history that I hope to post about some other time. It is meant to be a sort of non-commitment and a sort of onomatopoeia related to the internet and digital technology generally. For now, I’ll just leave it at that.

The current tagline, “Making love work,” was something I had considered making the title. I like this phrase because (no surprise) of its double meaning. This phrase has run through my mind again and again over the past several months, as I prepared to get married, got married, and am now being recently married. I have been thinking that you make love work by making love work, as in, you make it function by turning it into work, a project.

And this phrase and it’s two inter-related meanings have also been resonating with another phrase, popularized, in my sphere, by Bravo star Tim Gunn: “Make it work.” He frequently says this to contestants on Project Runway. I love the relationship he has with these contestants and I love the role this phrase plays in that relationship. Tim Gunn is one of the main reasons PR is so far superior to the next-best reality contest show, Top Chef. There is no intermediary, non-judging expert on Top Chef. There, everyone who’s not a competitor is a judge. Tim Gunn is always interested, always serious and critical, always faithful and encouraging, and always opinionated but nonpartisan. He’s a teacher, father figure, psychotherapist, secular priest.

Anyway, “make it work” is the slogan for the role he plays. He gives advice to each contestant and his advice always seems based in his vast knowledge and well-founded taste, but it always meets the contestant where they’re at. It doesn’t much matter what “it” is, as long as it “works,” as long as it goes somewhere good. Even if it’s fairly clear that he doesn’t really like the outfit and thinks it’s probably doomed, he talks it through with the designer and in the end, tells them to “make it work.” This means, as far as I can tell, both “make it work out” and “work at it.” Crucially, it doesn’t mean, “it will work out” or “just give it your best shot.” It means “this is work and you’ve got to go through with it and it might not be that great but it will be work.” It’s like “just do it” without the assumption that “doing it” will really be “fun.”

after not sleeping

I couldn’t sleep the other night and tried to post this then, but my hijacked internet connection wasn’t working. I have mixed feelings about posting it now. The reason I do is that I want to write things here. If this is only a place for good things or things I really like, it will be really empty and pointless. If it is a place for things, it might work.

At any rate, I’m interested in particulars, but in a general sort of way. For instance, I’m interested in myself, my experience or something, but really only as it relates to or is the general. The General, I suppose, is what I mean.
For instance, I was just lying awake thinking about math, reading Brian Rotman. I was thinking with him and realizing that I’ve thought with him for a while.

What am I doing? I feel like I’m back at stage one with this thing. Stage one as in middle school or something.

Or maybe I’ve just come to the point in the narrative of a young blogger where I question the purpose of my blogging. My friend Jim Brown will question it, in a different way, in the general case, at some point, possibly already past.

But what I thought was keeping me up or what was keeping me up initially was a question about math and finitude and the world-of-(human-)experience. I can’t think of a better way to put it. I was thinking of the discreteness that Rotman was talking about in Chapter 3 of Mathematics as Sign. I couldn’t stop reading it. It was the best reading I’ve ever done, both because it was good and because it was good for me. I mean, my major problem in grad school was reading too slow and too long. This happened fast or seemed to. At least it was painless. That’s probably because it is all I was thinking about doing.

So the talk of discreteness got me thinking about the little I’ve heard about finitude. I need to read more. That’s probably the bottom line.

But what I want to say is that the world is finite, bounded. It’s as big as this: _______. And all those spaces in between… Are they visible? They are gaps, nothings. They depict nothing. They are as much ends as the ends on the ends. It’s all compact, impacted, fractal. But Derrida knew this a long time ago. But it’s moving. He knew this too.

Does the performative give us a way “out” of this? A way to work out (of) the fractal? This is what I want to ask. But I might also… I might just want to know: Does the performative give me something more to say about this? That also connects my particular life with the world-of-(all-)experience(s)…. That makes me feel better about it. I like it better than the other thing. What’s the other thing? What am I scared of? It’s something Theresa hates. It’s the one-man-as-universal thing. Or so it seems. But it makes sense or it’s ok if it’s just about wanting to say something.

These things… They’re comin full circle

It’s the act that counts (bland)

Well, it’s almost Halloween, which means that the Christmas season has just about begun.  Sometime during this season of giving, you will probably hear the following wonderful cliche, especially if you are as bad at giving gifts as I am: “It’s the thought that counts.”

I love cliches of all kinds, but over the past few years, this one has come to bother me because, I think, unlike most cliches, this one is not true.  Not only is it not true, the (false) claim it makes masks an important theoretical insight: It’s the act that counts.

I often think about gifts to get people.  I spend as much time thinking about it as I spend thinking about a lot of less important things.  Often, I can’t think of something good enough, but the thought is there, nonetheless.  Other times I do think of something really good, but I don’t get it because of cost, circumstances, the fact that the potential recipient is not a very close friend of mine, etc.  If it were the thought that counts, then I’d have a high score indeed.  But I know, and people who know me would surely agree, that I am a big loser at the an-economic competition of gift-giving.

People only say “It’s the thought that counts” when a gift has been given.  The gift can be bad.  In fact, it usually is bad when the phrase is called for.  And the point of the utterance is to de-emphasize the badness of the gift.  The point is that something good or positive has taken place between the gift giver and receiver, even though the gift sucks.  For some odd reason, we feel it necessary to move from the bad gift to the purity and goodness of the thought.  The intention, I suppose, is what we’re trying to get at and approve of.

But let’s face it, despite all the “best intentions,” when I (or anyone in a similar situation) neglect to actually give a gift, it does not “count.”  In the situation of gift giving, you thoughts or intentions, though maybe meaningful on some level, do not count.  This is also the only way to explain why people (my spouse, et. al.) constantly advise me to stop obsessing over the perfect gift and just give something–it doesn’t matter what.  You can give a bad gift and something will be counted.

But what is counted?  It’s clearly not the object.  The object is overlooked and often gotten rid of–in the trash, the back of the closet, the Goodwill donation dumpster, or re-wrapped to continue its life as a bad gift.  It’s not the intention/thought since, as I said, the thought is often there but goes uncounted in the absence of an actual gift.  It doesn’t seem to have anything to do with the origin of the gift or how it was obtained; bad gifts, in this way, cut across all the assorted/sordid alienations of capitalism, alternately being expensive and gaudy, cheap and chintzy, lovingly but poorly baked, and assiduously knitted in horrendous colors.  It doesn’t seem to be about the source of the gift at all, since a bad gift that counts can come from a family member, a friend or lover, a social service organization, Santa or any other mythical being.

The only thing left, as far as I can tell, is the act, the empty form and content-less ritual of giving.

(A) thought on/in/for Brian Rotman

I am making my way through Brian Rotman’s Mathematics as Sign, slowly, non-linearly, and on-and-off-ly. Although I haven’t read it all, something/s need to be said at the moment:

Rotman criticizes the Fregean-contemporary (is it still popular/dominant?) version of Platonist philosophy of mathematics for many reasons. Here’s one point Rotman makes: Fregean Platonism posits “thought” as something eternal and unchanging that can be “apprehended” by thinking thinkers (people, more or less) but it “is incapable of giving a coherent account of knowing” (33). Rotman quotes Frege: “‘The apprehension of a thought presupposes someone who apprehends it, who thinks it. He is the bearer of the thinking but not of the thought. Althought the thought does not belong to the thinkers consciousness yet something in his consciousness must be aimed at that thought. But this should not be conufsed with the thought itself’ (Frege 1967, 35)” (33 emphasis mine). Rotman finds this problemaic because it leaves knowing, “the means by which we manage to apprehend [thoughts] in total mystery” (33).

Rotman then attempts to salvage this conception of math by translating it into semiotic terms. Luckily, for Rotman, this attempt at reform fails and, better yet, points up a more *constructive* way to re-theorize mathematics. I hope to return to Rotman’s constructive re-construction at a later date. For now, I’d like to wonder, briefly, about another response to Frege’s frigg-up.

Can Nietzsche come to Frege’s rescue? (After all, he is Superman, right?) Maybe Frege’s mistake is not that he leaves out the process by which the thinker and his (sic) thinking gets at the thought. Maybe the problem is that, for Frege, “The apprehension… presupposes someone who apprehends it, who thinks it (emphasis mine),” that, for Frege, the thinking must be born of a (masculine) thinker.

What if we follow Nietzsche’s line (one that runs to me through Judith Butler): ~”there is no doer behind the deed; there is no thinker behind the thought”~? If we approach the thinker as only (an) after-thought, maybe we can save something else or something more from Fregean Platonism than Rotman does…?

But what? And/or why?

I want to come back to this, but for now, I will just suggest that the answer to “why” has something to do with Brouwer’s conception of the solipsistic subject, expressivist composition pedagogy, and/or the religiosity/faith that some have identified (re)surfacing in/around/through poststructuralist/postmodern theory (the body of work that Rotman calls something like contemporary Post thought).

writing teaching history my

One thing I am doing right now is teaching freshman writing. One thing I am becoming more and more convinced of is that writing teachers need to concentrate on teaching writing. That sounds like a joke. It’s not.

I should say that I’m mostly thinking of “basic” writing, beginner courses.

Writing teachers often teach classes “on X” in which students do a lot of writing… about X. Even if the course is not explicitly “about X,” the teacher is forced by circumstances to come up with some X to make students practice reading and writing about. Last year, I taught a course that wasn’t explicitly focused on a particular X. But I was given a book to teach, a long book. The book was mainly about intellectual property law. And I brought in other, related readings, to support that book, so that the book didn’t just float through class out of context. Before I knew it, my course was largely (not completely but maybe primarily) about intellectual property law. This is what happens. The writing course becomes about what the writing is about.

All the energy a writing teacher puts into planning a class that deals with any “content”–other than the content that is writing–is energy directed away from the assumed goal of the course: teaching people how to write. Now, this is a rough patch I’ve entered because “how to write” without an object, without a specified type of text to be written, is a phrase some? all? many? most? writing teachers (the ones I like?) will probably avoid. It’s dangerous territory. It might seem like I’m implying that there could be a course in “general(ized) writing,” a writing course without content. I’m not. Not really.

The small liberal arts college I’m teaching at pairs all of its (mostly adjunct-taught) freshman writing classes with a year-long, thematically-focused, interdisciplinary course that is team-taught by two real professors. The writing instructor (or professor, in a few cases) has the option to line up his/er curriculum with the other course’s curriculum.

(P.S. This arrangement happens at a lot, or at least several, other colleges and universities. I tend to think of the required interdisciplinary course as the super-group or maybe the concept album or maybe the prog rock of the undergraduate humanities curriculum. It always sounds really ambitious and exciting and appears to have really figured out something important, but it often gets too big for its britches and turns out kinda corny.)

But the one I’m working with seems to be working quite well. I decided to connect my class to the other one as much as possible. I made this decision in part because I am bad at making decisions and this one felt like it would eliminate several other decisions. But I also made this decision because writing, rhetoric-as-writing, only works… sorry, works best when it’s plugged in somewhere.

This is one of the difficulties of writing-and-rhetoric’s interdisciplinary nature. It’s not interdisciplinary in the way that environmental science and robotics are interdisciplinary. Those two subjects are newly developed fields that have to draw on and combine the tools and insights of a variety of previously established disciplines to address historically unprecedented situations, questions, and problems. Rhetoric and/or rhetoric-as-writing is/are different. It/they is/are paradisciplinary. Writing-and-rhetoric, like any of the good old-fashioned humanities, addresses questions that have been around for a long time. It addresses questions that come up in a variety of contexts and situations. It is a parasite, but an essential parasite, and should be approached–that is, taught–as such. It only exists with something else that is not writing/rhetoric. It needs a site, a host. And no host-site will ever be sufficient. Every one will only bring writing partially into view/existence.

This is not, of course, to say that we shouldn’t have writing teachers and rhetoric teachers. Just because its a para-thing doesn’t mean it doesn’t warrant being approached–that is studied–”on it own.” It is, of course, only ever hypothetically or potentially “on its own.” And this is why, to double back, it should only be taught–taught to beginners, since they’re the only ones who need to be taught–with something. It can be studied “on its own,” but this is harder, and usually too hard for beginners. Experts in writing-and-rhetoric study in order to better teach their paradiscipline. They aren’t the only ones who teach it, though. Those regular disciplinary people also teach it. But they always teach it with whatever else they are teaching and, since they are experts in the whatever else, they foreground that.

Someone needs to step in and step on the content once in a while and talk about writing that content. The discipline person can do it and they might do a fine job. But writing is not just what goes and comes with that content. The writing person has studied the para-, writing “on its own.” This helps.

[P.S. = parascript]

Probably Probabble

One thing I’m doing while I’m not quite in school is studying probability. To be more specific, I am learning “the mathematics of probability [and] the many possible applications of this subject” by reading and exercising with Sheldon Ross’s A First Course in Probability, 6th ed. By “exercising with,” I mean attempting the examples, as well as the problems, exercises, and self-tests listed at the end of each chapter. At least… so far.

Chapter 1 is about “Combinatorial Analysis,” a subject I took a class or two on in college. It was mostly review, but for a number of reasons, it took me quite some time to finish. So, after spending several months, off-and-on, reading and exercising with the first chapter, I’ve just started reading chapter 2, on the “Axioms of Probability.” I’ve just started reading it; haven’t even really warmed up yet. But despite my lack of direct exposure to this material, I’ve been having a thought… a premature, unsubstantiated thought:

Probability theory is about experiments, possible outcomes, and events that have and have not occurred. This is obviously why it’s rhetorical. This is why so many rhetoricians have done said so many times that rhetoric is so probabilistic. But probability is math, dam-nit. And, more importantly… maybe… probability is… maybe… Deluzean.

What I am doing?

I’m currently on break from grad school. But I’m not spring break or winter break. This break is longer. It will last at least a year. At least. It is marriage break. Or maybe life break. I am not in school right now because of marriage, because of life.

In a sense, this is the first time in my life I have not really been in school or headed to school. I am still teaching at schools, though. So I am still in school in that way. At least, I’m becoming less and less in school.

Once in a while I have ideas, even when I’m not in school. (When I’m less in school. When I’m not so in school.) For a while at the beginning of this semester… (See: “semester”: that means I’m still in school. Or in school-time.) At the beginning of this semester, I was driving very long distances several times a week to go teach at different schools. Often, usually in the nervous adrenaline rush I get after teaching, I would have ideas. Some of these ideas were about teaching. Some were about writing: teaching writing or writing as a thing… an activity, I guess I mean… maybe an institution…? Some of these ideas were about other things. This is my attempt to have ideas and keep them somewhere.

This is not a post title

I have a blog now. I just got it. Just now.

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