Leading up to Ghost Theorizing

Thursday, August 25, 2011

Bus at 6:45 am, a bumpy one, as the handwriting for this entry attests to.  This a.m., in earlier email, I was “showing off” to Jenifer about an email I had sent to a student. Interesting that she was working late on the day before, as I was simultaneously working early on the next day. Needless to say, Jenifer was ahead of me having already documented and had the student recommended as a student of concern. It was a guilty pleasure. This kind of discourse is what used to fill our faculty writing group, where younger, beginning faculty could gossip about the craziness that they encountered in the department. Now those same “beginning” faculty are independent mature agents in the department, perhaps no longer needing the support and inclusion that JJ provided. So then what is to be the new reason or payoff for participating in a writing group? That begs the question of the purpose and payoffs of the doctoral student research/writing groups. It has to be more than a factory for generating publications. Are JJ parentals here, as well? Axiomatically, I guess. What do we (JJ) get by inhabiting this role – perhaps working out our own relationship in the contexts of our needy children. This a.m. it felt so good to get Jenifer’s emails.

On the use of “safe” audiences – it is important enough to want to impress – this may have been one of the weaker aspects of my doctoral seminar in the fall. I did not get up to a challenge in the course. But, generally, an anticipated audience should not be so threatening as cause a freeze up. This particular approach uses a paper presentation as a context, a distinctly social context, imagined in advance, like a transactional medium, so that the audience would be able to collect and assemble the latent author  through the language used in the text of the paper/presentation. Wolfgang Iser has proposed the implied reader, that is the reader is able to recover the person of the author that the author has staged, embedded, or intended through his text organization, word choices, tone. If that is possible to consider as a form of reader response, how about the implied writer – after Derrida, it is not as if the author really existed. I, the writer, am recoverable as an effect of the text when it is read. What writer is it that readers construct as the writer of the present text?  Is the Jim King who wrote text A similar at all to the Jim King who wrote text B? Iser got a book out of this. What if I took the implied reader to structure the implied writer as a form of response discourse? Reconstructing the implied writer. Or is this just subjective criticism I am rediscovering?

How would such a form of audience awareness work within early, emerging writers? There would need to some prerequisite level of metacognition, cognition beyond egocentrism. Though in writing this I wonder if there really such a thing as an egocentric stage, aren’t we all egocentric? And the idea of an egocentric stage seems a very structuralist way (dodge) of “explaining" patterned behaviors.

Someone just walked by as they entered the bus with days of unwashed body odor. I did not see who it was, not that I had any intention of mentioning it to them! But it does seem that smells, new, unexpected in this new social milieu really disrupt thinking, writing. They are examples of what Deb was trying to teach, lines of flight, or “disruption” that allow me to think in new directions, where this paragraph results from it, there it is, a new assemblage.

I wonder about the place of complexity theory in composing – Deleuze and Guitarri ; Sumara and Davis – Applied Complexity Theory (there is a certain irony there); Applied Complexity Theory [sic] in Composition Studies.

My bus is tailgating another city bus, winding out the engine, but with the clutch in. Traffic is something I haven’t even begun to think about or control through understanding – that’s what comprehension is, the control of ambiguity, but ambiguity is the collection of difference in alternatives. Once the uncertainty is resolved, there is but a single product to assimilate. The drive toward meaning is control of the text.

“Be the boss of the text.” You decide what the author meant. Make a determination, and then use your resources to check your guess. But if I’m already the boss, why subject myself to various interpretations? Seems like a step down – how do kids emerge from King Baby to response – Is it the needs for love and acceptance – you must have others who interpret like you do – communities of practice, interpretive communities, reading groups, inside a hierarchical social setting. Here might be the paradigmatic shift that reading might make – honoring the partial correct, "playing meaning" within the textual, interpretive ecology, making the space for readers to discover the benefits of richer, different interpretation, moving away from what is right/wrong to what is possible/plausible/productive ooooo The restraint required in teacher response would be huge. It also seems like a re-enactment of Summerhill.

Here I notice that I keep Summerhill out there as a comparative check. This is the benefit of miscues – once so categorized, they operate as a limit function “Don’t want to replicate Summerhill!” Though one could purposefully do so (or in some way like it) to transgress, exceed the established limit. But rather than operating truly beyond the structures of the limit, the intentional exceeding path would be in comparison to the limit (i.e., how much, in what ways, are “we” like/unlike what we know about Summerhill?) The same could be arranged with “whole language” Whole language as limit function in literacy. In what ways is the spector of whole language currently shaping literacy policy? How is “whole language’ being used to narrow, reduce commodify other language and literacy approaches, processes? How is whole language construed as a ghost pedagogy?

In arguing for “ghost theorizing” Stockton offers examinations of popular culture’s manifestations of childhoods in text. Conversely, she argues for lateralized, alternative versions of received theory that exist alongside of and help to elaborate, define, or delimit the more surface level, everyday accounts of the phenomenon. For Stockton, it is  in the theoretical constructions of childhood. But this same aproach of ghost theorizing can be used with the multiple and competing approaches to literacy. One can easily make the case that whole language is no longer being used as an approach to early literacy. One could say that whole language has died as a pedagogy. It simply has too much baggage attached to it through media attributions. Whole language is dead. Yet, it continues to be used (appropriated) by opponents of what was whole language. This in fact means that whole language, the concept, if not the practice, remains alive in some ghosted, commodified form. In this way, whole language has a ghosted existence. It is available, endlessly, for opponents' use to villify the thing that no longer exists. Whole language is being used as a limit function to police teachers into conformance with another way of thinking about reading. I can just see the finger wagging that goes with it exumation "you wouldn't want to practice whole language." as if it was a corrupting influence, or a sin. Interestingly, these admonitions have nothing to do with teaching young ones to read.