Collaborative Genius II (emerging phenomena)

Dear College,

Collaborative Genius II

Years ago Dean Virginia McKinley sent me an article
about a local speech by an academic claiming,

“We don't teach our students
how to argue.”

We don’t practice it ourselves. It’s the Liberal Art:

arg: “to shine”—the shining.
Consider: Jason and the Argonauts,
searching for Golden Fleece.
Argentina—city of shining lights.

The etymological origin of “ARGUMENT” has
positive, edifying significance: back & forth, the
exchange of views, building up shared templates,
a temple! edification of collaborative genius.
We build this city with rock & roll. Argentina
of our own. An emerging phenomena.



There’s this image, too. Anti-Thesis
The dia-bolical: throwing it across.
Deconstruction. Demoralization
Elenchus. Aporia.

This image represents the notion of ARGUMENT
nobody loves, yes? Babel Undone. Squabbling.
Quarreling. Tearing things apart. mommy-&-daddy-
arguing- again-gonna divorce makes it difficult
to pitch ARGUMENT as cool, edifying: liberal art!

Who loves arguing, raise your hand. See?.
Why can’t we all just get along? On the same page.
How to frame both the “sym-bolical” and “dia-bolical”
as essential and welcome to the class room?

The challenge of liberal art.

“Without Contraries Is No Progress.” says Blake;
and it’s our accentuating the “positive” and our
polite political dismay for “negative” that might
be said to put a bushel over our intellective &
affective “fire” say—just for the sake of argument:
plastic sheeting over our strawberry patch with
cut-out holes so that nothing but strawberries
will grow.

Political Correctness Concerns: what happens when
there’s no Separation of State and School Modes.

School Mode: Question Everything.
For the sake of argument, of course.

I had re-read Marshall McLuhan's Understanding
Media for a class in the Humanities, and the movie
Fight Club had just come out—much acclaim and
some controversy: a model for inner struggle, the
wrestle, wrangle, and agon(y) of self realization.

What with Faculty L a new media for ongoing forum,
(our own Hyde Park and local food-back cultivation),
clearly our “infrastructure” for collegial communication
had not caught up with the fact that conversation-
across-the-curriculum could now be ongoing:
24/7/365. Any body could get in or out of it
—whatever the topic.

Courses without borders! A local intellectual
conflagration beyond the confines of 4:00 meetings
and Garden Cabin Faculty Presentations.

But: culture lags. Between the cerebral habits and
affective habitats of institutional policies and
attitudes on the one hand, & the technologies that
reconfigure the environment-we-live-in on the other:
a GAP. Always: a lag between psychological and
technological environments: a lag/gap might could
be part of our Environmental Studies and Leadership
programs--as well as our Sustainability Club..

But it’s not.

Imagine how long it took to get a message to
California when this school was founded. Imagine
what “school” was like then. Kids went to class, read
books, took notes, discussed, took quizzes and exams
—no doubt. The COURSE was the unit of procedure
and assessment. Same as it always was.

When Cleanthe Brooks long ago lectured me on
“The New Criticism,” I had to type papers on a
manual Royal, sit in class and take notes, go to the
library to look-up stuff, footnote properly, wake up
in time for 11:00's, take final examinations
("Here's 6 topics," Brooks would say: "write on 2 or 3")
if not quizzes. The ball point pen hadn't yet appeared
but the overall deal was practically the same as now
even though both space and time have since been
reformatted by e-media and we’re all in touch-type
with each other as well as with The Intelligence of the
Universe As We Know It So Far.

Google This: e = mc squared, hegemony, phatic
communion, improvised explosive device,
WWII, "no man is an island"...name it:
Google delivers.

I'm living in a post-literate neo-oral environment
while still practicing education & thinking in terms
of Standard Literacy & the Book-o-cracy. Every time
a student comes to work on my computer for me, I
hide my illiteracy with chatter about Hawthorne,
Melville, Bukowski or ask about summer plans.

Virginia had a habit of saying “Well, that's a conversation
we need to have but not now,” and others during some
meeting or other would raise a hand imploringly: “We
need to have a conversation about such and such, or we
must have a conversation about this and that: retention
or study skills or general education or quality enhancement
or parking spaces or faculty load or class attendance policies
or e-tech media, classroom environmentalism and the
proliferation of hyper-active attention deficit syndrome.”

The need to have-a-conversation.

That became the phrase to indicate a bundle of concern
with some deal or other. And of course it's a throw-away
phrase like “I'll call you sometime.” “Hey, got to get
together soon..” Unless it goes down on the calendar—
for 4:00 one of these afternoons—there's no conversation.
It's not going to happen. It'll never happen. Even in the
scheduled meetings: would you characterize what
happens as having a conversation?

It’s possible now. Any time. Bring it up. Post it.
We can talk. Committee of the WHOLE. This is
where the “ownership” of the program is built.
An edifice rising. Everything that converges.
An emerging phenomena. Our Intellective
& Affective sparking. Local food.

McLuhan characterized the general human
tendency to pay almost exclusive attention
to the obvious bottom-line “content” of
communication—subject-matter, the topic
(tv programs, course content, story line and
linear sequence...) as opposed to the medium
or media: the delivery system: the fact that
tv-is-in-every home he felt more significant
than the criticism of the Wasteland of
Programming going on in the 50’s.

Now: more or less cell-phones on every ear,
internet connection on every lap, Global
Positioning Systems in every automobile,
virtual reality games in every home. Everyone's
encyclopedic. Polymath. (Give me a second:
I'll check that out.)

POINT: it’s not so much what we know that
counts seeing as knowledge is ubiquitous—literally:
at hand—but whether we can put IT in play. We
don't teach our students how to argue because we
don't practice IT our selves. We could nowadays.
The technology is here for us. Desk top academy:
virtual groves for the peripatetic, porch for the stoic.
We could be skinning the categories (let me count
the ways ) of our shared profession, practicing our
Disciplines as Dr. Otterness urges, right here at
home where charity if not clarity is said to begin.
Local food back.

That’s all I’m saying.
Over and over again.
Nature loves redundancy
even if English Teachers
and Writing Instructors
don’t so much.

I would make this prettier, if I could.
But I need help. Always begging for it.

xxxooo, Sam