Evergreen Course Blog | Spring 2011 | Reclaiming Public Spaces

Lecture Persona: Hybrid (mix of straightforward lecture/discussion)

*note the use of slide work, & the use of the console (as we split into groups, and as you begin lecturing–more on that soon!–think about whether you’ll be using various media)

FIRST 5 MIN: writing to the music of Schoenberg (2nd Mov., the opera Moses und Aaron)

Follow-up to Freire:

Last time we concentrated on Freire’s main contributions, and focused on lecture format, how or whether it can be squared away with Freire’s dialog-based co-learning, and regardless, what the efficacies of the lecture are for the generation of poetic engagement, and engagement in writing generally, maybe a unique kind of knowledge or thinking.

We began posing the question about what art has to do with education, and here we’re talking about radical educational projects, thus radical or avant-garde poetic and other text arts projects.

One way to follow-up on where we ended last time is to suggest that the lecture which involves the greatest praxis comes closest to the dialog based education of Freire.  Why?

I want to divide this lecture time up into to strands, two arms of discussion: 1) talking thru 2 earlier, that is, historically modernist (poetry of the two world wars and just after) notions of the use value of poetry: ideas about the poem as autonomous sensuous experience, and a unique interactive/collaborative endeavor insofar as the text begins to be thought of as not simply what is on the page, but a complete ecosystem involving the reader as worker; and 2) a growing divide in the alternative education movement, beginning prior to Freire, dating back to the 1930s and Black Mountain College, the divide between radical education as change within the institution, and radical education as emancipation from the institution.

But first, on to earlier modernist poetry and praxis:

– Aristotle wrote in The Ethics and in The Poetics that there were three basic activities of “free men”: theoria, poesis, and praxis. There corresponded to these kinds of activity three types of knowledge: theoretical, to which the end goal was truth; poietical, to which the end goal was production; and practical, to which the end goal was action.

–Praxis is the practice, or active involvement of participants, in generating knowledge.

Does it follow that:

–The less passive you are in a lecture, the more involved the lecture allows all to be, the more praxis-oriented it is.  At its outer limits, the extreme lecture is rather a conversation, a dialog—a seminar, basically.

–Modernist poetry and poetics is often marked as such due to reactive and dramatic shifts in the way the poem is thought of, the way it is situated in its cultural context, and the way that context shapes the way the poem is thought of.  What I want us to concentrate on among the elements of this shift is the idea that poetry increasingly becomes thought of as a kind of praxis.

–The easy book, the book that entertains, involves little to no praxis—it’s not making you work to understand anything, its content is driven towards capturing your attention, not helping make meaning out of the piece; the book is the locus of activity, and the story, or the idea within it, is a world unto itself. Detective stories for example.  For modernists such as Stein, there is a reaction was to late 19th century Romanticism and the popular lyric. 

Difficult poetry (Bernstein), avant-garde poetry, is considered as such because it not only pushes boundaries of the form, but pushes you, the reader, to make meaning in various ways.  And this is a learning experience.  A unique kind of learning experience: an aesthetic one.

Does it follow:

That the most like a Freirean dialog the text is, the more praxis-oriented it is, the more it has use value beyond other functions it may have, such as entertainment, or beauty, wrote memorization, or database like knowledge, or offering a world view in totality, etc. 

Again, a unique kind of learning experience—an aesthetic experience that involves indirection, or often, disjunction—getting the brain and the body to activate in ways that are unusual, leading, as James and Dewey conjectured, to different ways of knowing.  So as reaction to various movements within poetry, but also as influenced by early proponents of the alternative education movement, the avant-garde text is disjunctive, deeply dialogic, where one thing doesn’t easily lead to the next, but the order isn’t necessarily random.  There is meaning there, but you must help to create it.  You are now closer to being on equal footing with the writer/teacher.  The relationships here break down, even if this is not historically the writer’s intention. 

Let’s start with Stein. 

First, as to her poetics.  Stein studied psychology before turning to poetry, and studied with William James.  It is with him that she developed the idea of Normal Motor Automatism – a kind of cognitive (and sensory) process that she hypothesized occurs when the attention is split by doing more than one intellectual activity at a time, and for Stein, her interest was in the simultaneity of writing and speaking.  The output, notes contemporary poet and expert on Stein, Keith Waldrop, is the poem as a kind of “inner speech,” a sort of writing that mirrors, or is the written equivalent, of the “voice in the head” prior to the brain assembling that language into propositions, full sentences—subject, object, noun, etc. 

So I want to do 2 writing procedures here:

1)    we read the poem aloud, where anyone can jump in at any point.  Then play with varying numbers of readers, reading aloud, from different points of entry.  Read for 5 min.

2)    Predicating Stein: take one small section and turn it into “predicated sentences,” that is, what you imagine these lines to translate into as a full, “normal” sentences.

Discussion about the aurality of Stein: some of you said it accessed the poem for you; others said that you had already felt at home playing with her work, reading it aloud to yourself prior.

Further discussion:

–noting, after predicating Stein, that a lot of the “predications” had similar narratives

–we looked at the structure of “Picasso”: the revealing, the pre-cognitive linguistic fragments in the head plus sensorial mode of relating to;

–this, as function of the heavy reliance on parts of speech and conditionals without adjectives; nouns without many modifiers, typical of Stein;

–such lacks in the line, such constructions, give one “the effect of experiencing a thing/person” rather than a description of “what the thing is like” 

–one “makes meaning” WITH Stein, one can say.  

–and this collective re-calibration of the way one thinks has POLITICAL implications, insofar as (some of you spoke about this) the work becomes radically juxtaposed to DOMINANT MODES OF DISCOURSE, and so as SUB-DOMINANT, it sort of frees us up in tiny ways, and this spills over, however minutely, into our everyday ways being in the world.  

–THE RADICAL ACT OF PLAY: Play, here, play in Stein and in how we make meaning thru this sensuous material, is itself a radical act–

–some discussion about how play is sanctioned in our society (insofar as play is not instrumental, or thought to be “productive,” the playing individual is “useless” in a system of commodity exchange, a cultural economy that prizes usefulness, purpose, goal-oriented behaviors)

Slide of Picasso’s painting of Stein, which she is claimed to have tried to described via talking out loud while writing, thus producing this piece. 

http://www.arthistoryarchive.com/arthistory/cubism/images/PabloPicasso-Gertrude-Stein-1905-06.jpg

This is praxis at work, and a particular sort: ekphrasis. 

Ekphrasis: literally, the translation of visual art into language (now has broader meaning)

Stein was not herself firmly political—eg, part of any political movement per se, but her work has influenced most, if not nearly all, left political poets.

 

Turning to Oppen and excerpts of Of Being Numerous (we will pick up on Oppen and the Radical Education divide next week—here we’ll just introduce some ideas):

–Turning to the radical act of play to the possibility that we are less free to play than we might think, as evidenced in the way our language is used, and how we use language in ways we might not even be aware of:

Oppen, though his poetics and his politics are severely different, was influenced by Stein’s praxis-oriented work, and this plays out how?

–Some brief discussion about the background of Oppen, where his work and Objectivism are situated (thought to be, often enough, at least)–

–Oppen: “Relevant thought begins with mistrust of language”

From his Daybooks, a series which is then sculpted, much of it into Of Being Numerous comes the poem

 

Possible
To use
Words provided one treat them
As enemies.
Not enemies  — Ghosts
Which have run mad
In the subways
And of course the institutions
And the banks. If one captures them
One by one proceeding

Carefully they will restore
I hope to meaning
And to sense. (NCP 116; SP 51)

[NOTE THAT THE LINEBREAKS HERE ARE LOST DUE TO THE FORMATTING OF WORD PRESS]

–SOME BRIEF DISCUSSION OF THIS PASSAGE IN RELATION TO OUR EXCERPTS: Observations, thoughts on how the poem is functioning, what we notice

–MISTRUST OF LANGUAGE: a mistrust of the culture that produces our language(s)?  Our economies?

–LANGUAGE AS MORE THAN INFECTED BY, e.g., CAPITALIST VALUES, BUT CENTRAL TO THESE SYSTEMS/VALUES, hence INESCAPABLE (here, we come back to the possibility of being unable to freely interrogate anything, let alone radically play–for we who use this language are its culture’s products)

Also, for Oppen, as one of the major proponents of the Objectivist school, agreeing with William Carlos Williams, another objectivist colleague, we have the famous phrase (from Williams’ long poem in 4 books, Patterson)

“no ideas but in things”

–What does this mean?  In relation to the poem and the Oppen quote above?  In relation to the excerpts of OF Being Numerous that we have here?

Which is to say that language –words—are “things” ?

Some background on Oppen’s politics of language—poetic action (remember Aristotle: generation of one “kind” of knowledge”) and it’s relation to political action

–In these excerpts of the much longer poem: a clear investigation of the material of language and its relation to things; an interrogation of what it means to know (brief discussion of what Oppen’s epistemology might be…):

–Note that the work is disjunctive, disjunctive, however, in ways quite different from the concerns (poetic and otherwise) of Stein; also the use of pivoting–around “If’s or “Might’s” and various conditionals that point to the potential of the future (that it might be different than we often expect, or assume, say?), OUR POTENTIAL to perhaps change it, via looking at present conditions– or at least change in the sense of knowing the present, knowing that we do not know, hence do not know “a” future, let alone “the” future? 

Looking at Stephen Cope’s writings on Stein:

–in a world where writing and speech are used primarily as means of exchange  —  and “for private purposes,” to say what this or that person thinks or feels, to give orders, to make contracts between private parties, to objectify the anguish of our isolation” (57)  —  words do behave like phantoms of “some counterfeit social currency, dwelling amidst a populace that is likewise so abstract”

–So praxis here, is in the idea of poetry as a sort of precise, yet unfinished, interrogation of language, a shared language, where to interrogate the poem is dialogic:

–seemingly easy, due to the simplicity of the lines, Oppen’s wrestling with how we come to know, and how we come to be ghosted, yet truly difficult, as we are, in looking at this work, dialectically entangled with the construction of language as (now) late capitalist commodity—and so is the work itself, it becomes what it tries to describe/interrogate (the act of ghosting and abstracting people–and their potential–into a sphere of exchange, a becoming invisible). 

How does this hook up to the politics of language, but politics generally?

Does this POETICS allow us to re-think, or re-imagine, or investigate the efficacies of, our POLITICS?  

–Does one in form the other?  

Cope writes of Oppen’s short passage below:

Oppen’s conditional rhetoric  —  “as ifs,” “if/thens” and Aristotelian “might bes”  —  ought then be regarded as crucial to the social and historical (if not precisely “political”) character of his poetics as much as they are pivotal to his epistemological thought. For this justifies Oppen’s conception of “art” and “politics” as necessarily distinct arenas of praxis. “Is it more important,” he asks in a candid moment of reflection in his papers, “to produce art or to engage in ^take political action^.” He offers the following comparison in response:

art and political action are in precise opposition in this regard: that it can always be quite easily shown that political action is going to be valuable; it is difficult to ever prove that it has been in the past ^that political action has been valuable^. Whereas art is precisely the opposite case: it seems always impossible to prove that it is going to be valuable, and yet it is always quite clear that in the past it has been. the art of the past has been of value to humanity. I offer it only as a suggestion that art lacks in political action, not action (Daybooks, 89).


But the interrogative aspects of the everyday here in this piece, Cope would argue, as would many others. For Oppen, the work of art is not so much justified by its immediate or apparent efficacy as it is justified by the place it takes in and effect it has on history  –cultural and/or human history writ large

For Oppen:

“Yet, because art is also inescapably determined by the terms and conditions of the present,” writes Cope, “it must remain incomplete, impassive, critically aware of both its own limitations and  —  faithfully  —  of the possibility for its realization that the future holds.”

–so not only the sense that epistemology (how we might come to know, and what “to know” might mean) informs us in ways maybe not “precisely political” but pivotal to “The Political” arena; but ALSO :

PRAXIS writ large (the future = a society, hence societal praxis): that the future (us, say), referring to the Cope and to Oppen’s quotes above, will help make meaning (use) of this work, and THIS is where poetic and political action cross paths — that we are in some ways not completely beholden to what the future brings, hence what the poem now means–we must MAKE THAT MEANING.  A deep puzzle:  why would this be the case?  How do these notions thread together into “a poetics”?  This is also to ask: what can the poem DO?

–is this poetic praxis as allegorical of political action?  

Going back to individual lines in our excerpts (section 26 of Of Being Numerous)

BRIEF DISCUSSION

DAVID ENDS DISCUSSION A BIT EARLY—TO PICK BACK UP WHERE WE LEFT OFF NEXT WEE—SO THAT WE CAN BEGIN SHARING PEDAGOGICAL EXPERIENCES (the writing assignment)…

–3 shared experiences to help us begin this discussion in groups for Saturday!

–We’ll workshop these Saturday, so BRING ALL WRITING YOU’VE DONE SO FAR FOR THIS COURSE TO CLASS ON SAT—

—

Questions for beginning of next lecture:

Look at the questions regarding Oppen again, read Oppen again–bring more questions.  Try to find an analysis of what this work that we’ve looked at is doing or describing, with or without the help of what we’ve discussed, Oppen’s own notebooks, and/or Cope’s writing – what are your own thoughts based in the poem excerpt alone?

So we will have looked very briefly at 2 trajectories, and of course there are more in text arts, that hook up poetry with praxis, and praxis with political action.

How, then, do these trajectories hook up to pedagogy?  Specifically to the review I had all of you read? (think about Johanson’s review)

Dear All,

This week’s (Week 2) lecture will be on The Politics of Poetic Form: The Earlier Avant-Garde Poetry Movements In America, Praxis, & Pedagogy 

Please READ ALL ASSIGNED READINGS, and come prepared to discuss!  The readings are each VERY SHORT, so though it may seem like a lot, it’s really quite small, about the same amount of work as last week, maybe a bit less.  So, since each piece is so short, READ CAREFULLY.  Try to draw connections, and try to draw on Freire in doing so.  What sort of questions emerge for you after reading these?  How does the Toscano poem–which we will get to sooner or later–relate to the poems and to the article?  

Remember to keep a common place book (a notebook with your writings, notes, etc.).  

PLEASE BRING YOUR ASSIGNED WRITING (On your experiences so far at Evergreen or another college, one example each, the most enriching and the least, and why, with description of what each pedagogical practice/experience entailed).

We’ll begin lecture by sharing this work. 

See you on Wednesday

1) Carla Harryman, “Orgasms,” from Adorno’s Noise.  Availabe as pdf   HERE

http://www.cipa.ulg.ac.be/intervalles4/32_harryman.pdf

2) Charles Bernstein, “The Difficult Poem.”  Available as link  HERE

http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/bernstein/essays/difficult-poem.html

3) Gertrude Stein, “If I Told Him: A Complete Portrait of Picasso.”  Available as link  HERE

http://www.english.upenn.edu/~jenglish/Courses/Spring02/104/steinpicasso.html

4) George Oppen, from Of Being Numerous.  Available as link  HERE

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=175679

5) Review of Cote & Peuter’s Utopian Pedagogy by Reg Johanson.  Available below, or click on the link, scroll down, and read it online   HERE – if you read this below instead of clicking on this link, at some point, click the link because The Rain Review is an excellent resource! And, of course, the link is easier to read…

Utopian Pedagogy: Radical Experiments Against Neoliberal Globalization. 

Edited by Mark Cote, Richard J.F. Day and Greig de Peuter.

University of Toronto Press, 2007.

Reviewed by Reg Johanson 

 

These essays offer diverse analyses of how neoliberal capital has changed the university, how these changes have developed a new kind of intellectuality and the locations and spaces where pedagogy has, or might, confront and provide alternatives to the world that neoliberalism is making. Despite the editors’ contention, in their essay “Academicus Affinitatus: Academic Dissent, Community Education, and Critical U”, that “whatever strategies we adopt, it is imperative for us to continue to defend the university as a site of critical inquiry”, for many contributors the university seems more likely than ever before to remain an institution of reproduction, rather than transformation. In the anthology’s first section, “The Contested University”, Nick Dyer-Witherford, Ian Angus, Jerry Zaslove and Stuart Hall, among others, offer accounts of the ways in which neoliberalism has transformed the university, and assess the university’s potential as a site of radical pedagogy. 

 

The post-Second World War “interlude”, as Ian Angus calls it, in the universities was not without its contradictions, which have been exploited by neoliberal capital to decompose the alliances and gains of the period. As Stuart Hall points out, the opening-up of the university in the post-war years transformed its previously “elite, male, white” character, but also coincided with a decrease in state investment, which has put pressure on working and learning conditions and has forced universities to seek funding from corporate interests. According to Jerry Zaslove even though the student movements of the sixties were the only authentic social force that could name and oppose schooling as part of a system that seemed to be repeating Europe’s capitulation to fascism, […] the culture of extremes during the Cold War was lived out in both the desire for a radical pedagogical turn, and a desire to open the doors of the university to more students. The critique of the university danced in tandem with economic necessity to broaden the university to include more students, more of everything. The extremes of mass culture and the knowledge industry met.

 

The result is a “Wal-Martiversity”, as Zaslove calls it, where education is rationalized to corporate demands for specific outcomes. For Ian Angus the mass university was the product of a bargain with the state and capital: universities and the intellectuals they employed would be given money and space but their criticisms of society must remain “academic”. Respect for the separation of “spheres of society”—economic, academic, political, military—was part of the deal. But this separation was violated by the university’s involvement in, on one side, war research, and on the other side, by the emerging critique of the “knowledge factory”, of the university’s role in the reproduction of a specific socio-economic order and the suppression of the possibility of producing others. The gains of this period—strong tenure rights, very little contract work, academic freedom—have been under attack ever since. 

 

For Nick Dyer-Witherford it is the growth of “cognitive capitalism” that characterizes the history of the university since the 1960s. According to Dyer-Witherford, “capitalism went cognitive in the 1960s and 1970s not only because computers and biotech innovations were available, but also because high-tech options became attractive as responses to the massive unrest that was besetting industrial, Fordist capitalism—strikes by industrial movements, the emergence of the new social movements, and guerrilla wars in Vietnam and elsewhere.” The result was a greater “integration of universities and business, which was vital to the development of high-tech ‘knowledge industries’”, and in which capital becomes more intellectual and intellectuals become not only more productive but also more entrepreneurial. 

 

These accounts, unlike some in the anthology, do not end in calls for the “return” of a “public university”, which the authors recognize was always only a myth. However, as Angus says, “there was always a minority for whom the corporate function and even the citizenship function were questionable as such”, suggesting that the activity of the university hasn’t always or necessarily been about reproduction. And Zaslove argues that “while the system has adjusted itself to the coming of the ultramass university”—that is, recomposed itself against the threat to its order that mass education has the potential to become—“the utopian impulse to make radical pedagogy into an image of a critical institution has not been entirely misdirected in its original form, nor has it entirely dissipated”. 

 

However, the line of thinking I am most grateful for in this anthology leads out of the university. Although “being free in a classroom might be as close to a portable radical utopia as one can get”, Zaslove argues that “where the utopian pedagogy of the classroom would lead, no university can tell us. No pieties about liberal studies, no humanities as citizenship, no remixing of interdisciplinary studies as a new technology of knowledge, has the answer.” For Zaslove “the real question” is “in the global market, where is the critical education public sphere? And who is excluded from the education that at one time was assumed to be open to all? Those outside can be labelled the new global proletariat, the new exiles.” These are the migrants, the slum dwellers, the maquiladora workers, those pushed off land and out of jobs by the new enclosures. “If it is to be a vibrant force”, Zaslove argues, “a utopian practice must address the discarded, the victims of the excesses, the ones who qualify only as an afterthought, and those who don’t qualify at all for entry into institutions built by a now calcified neoliberal ideology. Not with ‘human rights’ or ‘multiculturalism’, but with what I would call the ‘displaced radical pedagogy’ of those who stand at the door of the future and carry the weight of the world.” 

Dyer-Witherford, on the other hand, does see the university as a potentially viable site for radical pedagogy. The cognitivizing and networking of the universities has put the means of production in the hands of the labourers/students: “The great irony of cognitive capitalism is that it has failed to adequately contain and control the network that is [its] greatest achievement.” For Dyer-Witherford, “the networking of the universities, while in some ways deepening academia’s integration with cognitive capital, is simultaneously creating opportunities for students to test the limits of this subsumption.” As a result of this integration, “the conventional distinction between the university and the ‘real world’ […] is becoming less and less relevant.” On this account, struggles against neoliberal capitalism are also struggles in and against the neoliberal university. 

The anthology offers two very different subjects of utopian pedagogy. Are they Zaslove’s “new exiles”, the people Stuart Hall characterizes as “the multitudes” who are “doing the shit work of global capital, […] servicing it, feeding it, washing its windows late at night, cleaning its offices and looking after the children of global entrepreneurs”? Or are they Dyer-Witherford’s new “mass intellectuals”, the “immaterial” and “cognitive” labourers that have been produced by globalized, networked capital? It would seem obvious that the answer is “both”. Writing from the perspective of the “global north”, the theoreticians of the “general intellect” privilege immaterial and cognitive labour. In Part Two of the anthology, “Rethinking the Intellectual”, Franco Berardi’s “From Intellectuals to Cognitarians” argues that labour has become increasingly “intellectual”:

 

in the second half of the twentieth century, following mass education and the technoscientific transformation of production that came about through the direct integration of different knowledges, the role of the intellectual was redefined. No longer were intellectuals a class independent of production; no longer were they free individuals who took upon themselves the task of a purely ethical and freely cognitive choice; instead the intellectual became a mass social subject that tended to become an integral part of the general productive process. Paolo Virno uses the term ‘mass intellectuality’ to denote the formation of social subjectivity tied to the massification of intellectual capacity in advanced industrial society. 

 

Berardi calls these mass intellectuals “the cognitariat”, who “represent the social subjectivity of the general intellect.” According to Dyer-Witherford, the term “general intellect”, from Marx, refers to “the increasing importance of machinery […] and in particular the salience of both automation and transportation networks. [Marx’s notion of the general intellect] can be seen as a prefigurative glimpse of today’s ‘post-Fordism’ or ‘information capitalism’, whose production teams, innovative milieux, and corporate research consortiums yield the ‘fixed capital’ of robotic factories, genetic engineering, and global computer networks.” 

 

From the perspective of the “global south”, Silvia Federici and George Caffentzis have criticized (in The Commoner 12 [Spring/Summer 2007]) this privileging of the general intellect, pointing out that “capitalist accumulation has thrived precisely through its capacity to simultaneously organize development and underdevelopment, waged and unwaged labour, production at the highest levels of technological know-how and production at the lowest levels.” A similar critique comes from within the anthology in the interview with Mariarosa Dalla Costa. For her, the globalization of reproductive and affective labour, primarily done by women and primarily low-tech, is the critical terrain of struggle. The fact that “the conditions of the labour of reproduction have worsened for the overwhelming majority of people in advanced countries and even more so in developing countries” is a result of neoliberal economic policies. New enclosures in the form of the Structural Adjustment Programs of the imf and World Bank in the global south have caused mass migrations, famine and war. Against Berardi and Dyer-Witherford, who see the networked, cyborg mass intellectuals as revolutionary agents because they are technological, global and diffuse, Dalla Costa proposes a critical reversal of perspective: “I maintain something that might sound heretical for those who [believe] that globalization is an ineluctable fact—that there is a need, in many respects but beginning with the agricultural and nutritional one, to relocalize development and ruralize the world again.” Because “the expropriation of the land, local cultivation, the local diversification of crops,” and the production of export crops are crucial issues for both the developed and nondeveloped world, “it is time that the debates around the money-form and technology were united […] with those of the land and of agriculture.” 

Other articles in the second section offer critiques of academic research and political militancy as well as new possibilities for the form and location of pedagogy. Guido Borio, Francesca Pozzi and Gigi Roggero, in “Conricerca as Political Action”, and the Argentinian collective Colectivos Situaciones, in “On the Researcher-Militant”, propose new figures of the activist-researcher-intellectual-pedagogue. In Borio et al, this new figure is the “coresearcher” who does “coresearch” (conricerca); in Colectivos Situaciones, it is the “researcher-militant”. These new figures are critiques of academic research, of the intellectual, and of the militant. 

 

For Borio et al, conricerca is “a production of knowledge that is ‘other than’, an experiment in organizational practices, and a space of resubjectification.” It is a form of research in which “one has no certainties, when that which is made an object of knowledge, and how to intervene in it, is not known.” The Colectivos argues that the researcher-militant must remain faithful to “not-knowing”; she is antipedagogical, that is, her work is not based on explication but on the discovery of what is not known: “It is not about teaching, nor is it about disseminating key texts; rather it is about looking into practices for a new sociability […] Research-militancy develops through workshops and collective reading. Together, these produce the conditions for thinking about and disseminating productive texts.” 

 

Unlike other contributors to Utopian Pedagogy, Borio et al reject the notion that there is any such thing as a “leading figure” in contemporary struggles. To the extent that neoliberalism has imposed “a despatialization of forms of labour and workers” there is no worker nor space that is central. Instead “a certain subject is not politically central exclusively insofar as it works in a strategic place within the overall systemic plan, nor only because it is quantitatively great in number: it becomes central when it is capable of producing conflict, of breaking given equilibriums, and of generalizing its own struggles”. 

 

Colectivos Situaciones makes a distinction between research militancy and both academic research and political militancy. Unlike academic research, which is “linked to the market and to scientific discourse, […] research militancy is the quest for sites where those same knowledges can be composed with popular ones […] It tries to generate a capacity for struggles to read themselves, and to capture and disseminate the advances and productions of other social practices.” And unlike the political militant, “the researcher-militant is a character composed of questions and is not saturated by ideological meanings and models of the world […] The goal is neither to politicize or intellectualize the social practices. It is not a question of managing to get them to make a leap in order to pass from the social to ‘serious politics’.” 

For Colectivos, academic researchers and activists “idealize” and “objectualize”, positing their knowledge of things as external to themselves. They do this “without interrogating themselves about their own values—that is to say, without having a subjective experience that transforms them.” They remain blind to themselves: “They can construct consistent knowledges of the situation so long as, and precisely thanks to, their being outside, at a prudent distance.” In Borio et al, the transversal movement of the coresearcher is not only about creating knowledge for the subjects of the oppressive system and thereby offering the potential for the “resubjectification” of others—the coresearcher must also resubjectify, becoming “functional for the system but also negating [her] function for the system […] in this process there is the possibility of constituting a form of social cooperation that is ‘other than’ and politically counterposed to the capitalist political character, that structures autonomy and constructs individual and collective counterpaths of liberation, all the while subtracting territory and undermining the progress of the systemic perspective.” Here, cooperation and power confront capitalist cooperation and power; it is a constitutive process, a “counter-accumulation of know-how and particular abilities directed towards the achievement of precise antisystemic goals.” 

The third section of Utopian Pedagogy, “Experiments in Utopian Pedagogy”, offers a wide range of specific instances of forms and locations of pedagogy beyond the university. Brian W. Alleyne, in “The Making of an Antiracist Cultural Politics in Post-Imperial Britain: The New Beacon Circle”, documents forms of black cultural production and antiracist organizing and education that challenge the terms of official British multiculturalism. Shveta Sarda in “‘Before Coming Here, Had You Thought Of A Place Like This’: Notes on Ambivalent Pedagogy from the Cybermohalla Experience” discusses a project in the slums of New Delhi in which students of a computer education program make and share knowledge of their neighbourhood—mohalla—through digital media. Richard Toews and Kelly Martin-Harris report, in “An Enigma in the Education System: sfu and the Secwepemc Cultural Education Society”, on their experiences as teacher and student in an educational partnership between Simon Fraser University and the Shuswap Nation Tribal Council. Sarita Srivastava, in the excellent “Let’s Talk: The Pedagogy and Politics of Antiracist Change”, argues that “contrary to their intended outcomes, the pedagogical practices and philosophies in antioppression or diversity workshops often produce people of color, queers, and other marginalized participants as the objects of knowledge”. “The goal”, she claims, “becomes knowledge about race that is produced by and about people of colour—knowledge for whites to scrutinize, reject, or express gratitude [towards]”. Imran Munir’s essay about secular Pakistani peasant struggles against enclosures, “The Subaltern Act! Peasant Struggles and Pedagogy in Pakistan”, is pertinent as Pakistan becomes more central in the struggle against neoliberal capital and its wars. 

 

Utopian Pedagogy suggests exciting possibilities for pedagogy outside of the university, but implies an untenable future for pedagogy within it. Should radical pedagogues fight for another university, within another, more just, state structure? Or should they begin to smuggle as much out of the neoliberal university as they can, like gangsters might distribute cigarettes or liquor (or books or computers) off the back of a hijacked truck? As a teacher in the post-secondary system myself I am aware that while the content of my courses—the things I say, the readings we do and the conversations we have—might be radical or encourage radicality, the structure in which we work undermines or vitiates real transformation and liberation. At best I can say “there are alternatives”. I cannot be or do those alternatives. At worst, my radicality can be recuperated by the neoliberal university, as one more “choice”, “point of view” or “lifestyle” on offer for the tuition dollar, bolstering the illusions of liberal democratic freedom. I may be merely providing my students with that highly recuperable skill: “thinking outside the box”.

 

 

Please join me, if your schedule allows, in going to this important talk below.  It involves all of us: those of us paying higher tuition, and who now have trouble paying for school, and faculty who, because of budget cuts, lose their jobs.  

In today’s, January 7, 2010 New York Times, Governor Arnold Schwarznegger’s chief of staff, Susan Kennedy said, “Those protests on the UC campuses the tipping point. Our university system is going to get the support it deserves.” Kennedy made these comments immediately after Republican Governor, Schwarznegger proposed cutting money for California prisons and putting the money saved into higher ed. Right now, 11% of the California budget goes to prisons,  and 7.5% goes to higher ed.  He proposed that at least 10% of the state budget go to California universities and colleges, and no more than 7% be used for prisons. This shows the value of militant protest and a growing  student movement with faculty and staff and community support to stop and reverse the budget cuts. Let us in Washington State learn from our brothers and sisters in California. 
Come here two leading activists in this movement, Wed., January 13th!

OCCUPY EVERYTHING!

Fighting Austerity on California Campuses

Wednesday January 13, 2010

The Evergreen State College, Seminar II, E1105

 

10:00am Presentation to Political Economy and Social Movements; Race, Class and Gender(all are welcome)

1:30pm Public Presentation-Sem 2, E1105

California is the tenth largest economy in the world and one of the states hardest hit by the current financial crisis. Although the effects of the crisis continue to be felt in real terms by those living in the state, there has been little to no resistance against the financial system responsible for the crisis and the concurrent austerity regime that is decimating social programs including public education.

The public universities of California have emerged as a possible front for confronting the restructuring that has arrived with the crisis. Faced with a 32% student fee increase, thousands of layoffs and pay cuts, students and workers have begun to organize on a mass scale to fight back. Amongst the repertoire of tactics, occupying buildings has shown to be one of the most effective, providing a fresh praxis for a new and contagious movement that has quickly spread across the state.

Come hear stories from this important struggle and watch video from some of the pivotal moments during the last months of 2009. We will focus on lessons learned and future strategies as well as provide space for discussion of possible connections with local organizing efforts connected with budget cuts and tuition increases at TESC.

[NEW STUDENTS: PLEASE SCROLL TWO POSTS DOWN & READ COURSE EXPECTATIONS/OUTLINE SCHEDULE]

Dear All,

Here is the lecture transcript for Week 1.  As you read this, think thru the questions I inserted here, some that I asked, some that some of you asked during our discussion.  The link to my public blog, which preceded the theme for this lecture, is also below.  Please feel free to post responses here, or on the public blog to that post.  Not required of course, but a way to further the discussion in the short time we have.  Also, fyi, my public blog and this course’s blog have blog links that are meant as resources for all the topics/issues we discuss, or nearly all.  I won’t be posting every lecture up here, because as I perform a different lecture “persona” each week (or nearly each week–), some won’t have transcripts.  Enjoy.

–David

LECTURE Week 1

 

TOPIC: FREIRE, THE LECTURE-AS-EDUCATIONAL MODEL, & TOSCANO’S CPT LETTER

 

PERSONA/LECTURE MODE: STANDARD WESTERN-MODEL (Historical/Thematic lecture of 1 professor standing in front of class, followed by Q&A period, with professor directing/facilitating the discussion)

 

–I will begin by performing the lecture, and want you to make a mouth sound when you sense that I have stopped, and a performance of dialogic education has begun

 

[ Post-lecture: no discernable mouth sounds, tho some students said they made mouth sounds at various points; one said that discussing/talking IS a mouth sound – Okay, yeah yeah ]

 

BACKGROUND: Socrates, Marx, & Freire

 

Freire is often spoken of—or at least POP is—in terms of five main contributions to philosophy and economy of education, beyond the Marxist dichotomy of banking education (dominant) and problem-posing, or dialogic education (sub-dominant, revolutionary).  We’ll get to politics and aesthetics of Freire in a moment, but presently, Freire’s five main contributions are often thought of as liberation or critical education necessarily entailing:

 

1)    dialog

2)    praxis

3)    developing a historical consciousness, one that has the power, or recognizes its power, to change the world

4)    site-specificity: taking the lived experience and the context, even the room one is in, into consideration as teachable aspects, or parts of the educational dialog

5)    transcendence thru dialectic, or in other words, a sort of mysticism based in Marxist Christianity, where terms like “redemption” are put into a dialectical framework: all can be redeemed, says Freire, within the banking model, the ruling classes—all can (and will!) transcend their given roles

 

Not that this is wrong—this seems quite right as a kind of outline of some of the more important aspects of Freire’s work, but I’m more interested in what I think, and what you think—.  So what I, firstly, want to focus on are the first two of these five points, dialog and praxis, but give them some historicity, as well as to ask: what’s Freire’s possible relation to the arts, and what’s contemporary critical education’s more general relation to aesthetics, to, say, radical art, if there is a relationship at all?  Why start here?

 

But still, what are we to make out of this “poetics” element

in “poetics theater” (PT). You might ask, “ok, why can’t the ‘poetics’

element of PT be made by a group of people (more than just RT)?”

And the answer to that is, it can, provided the participants have each

developed a poetics that is recognizable (in its political valence most of

all), so that a conjoining of poetics is a carefully honed negotiation

and not a watering down of each of the other.

–RT, “Strikes & Orgies”

 

 

–Notice the parallel here between Freire’s dialogic model and CPT, where both seem to entail the need for people on equal footing with regard to the practice/subject at hand.

 

–We’ll come back to this quote and look at it a bit closer in relation to the arts and education, but for now:

 

–As I wrote on my public blog a few days ago, here we are at Evergreen where the lecture, in some definable sense, is not the rule, but the exception.  Dialogic education, at least in terms of our stated mission as a school (maybe not in reality but…) is more the norm. 

 

–And I find myself giving lectures and then facilitating dialog when I perform THE STANDARD LECTURE, and it’s the lectures you crave (these, and more so, performative, more unusual lectures, but lectures nonetheless), very much expect and want badly, in addition to all the co-learning—and I did too, and still do!  I sense you’d like to sit back once in a while here and be entertained in a deep sense, in a sense that straddles the line between beauty as entertainment and art as moral lesson in the Aristotlean sense, in the sense that Euripides, wrote Aristotle in The Poetics, could bestow on an audience: art that not only drives the senses, but the intellect, such that a moral feeling might result. 

 

–I sense that some of you would like the lecture to be functional in this way, in the sense that the music for use, the modernist and movement in opera and the theater thought they could have it: to straddle that line between narrative drawing the audience in, into a world of its own, and yet, being obviously art, calling attention to its being artifice as juxtaposed to reality, being different enough from the norm, and critical enough (formally and otherwise) of the everyday, such that the art, or in this case the standard lecture, can teach in a sort of sideways, but not so praxis-driven, way.  It can serve to facilitate some sort of learning that enhances the dialogic process, as it itself is not complete—it’s necessarily fragmented enough for you to have to fill in its blanks.

 

–More so when the lecture is consciously non-normative, where entertainment has a use value beyond simply being novel, interesting:

 

–Were I to move my hand like this, then turn like this.  And linger on this quote, from Artaud’s Theater and Its Double:

 

We must insist upon the idea of culture-in-action, of culture growing within us like a new organ, a sort of second breath: and on civilization as an applied culture controlling even our subtlest actions, a presence of mind 

 

–And then go on with my lecture, leaving the quote dangling like so, I have neither sought to confound you nor have I filled you like an empty vessel.  I’ve neither led you by the hand and pressed a lesson into your mind treating it like Aristotle’s wax seal, nor have I simply obfuscated things in an attempt to impress you with my knowledge and your ignorance.

 

–This quote relates to what we are talking about, but I have not explained it away.

 

–Not if I continue on with the lecture in order that some praxis might appear to be at work here—as, perhaps a lack of fleshing the quote out with regard to how it works with and against Freire models a certain way of essaying, trying out, playing, such that seemingly disparate strands can be connected up by you, perhaps in 25 distinct, yet potentially related ways. 

 

–And this is to treat the non-normative lecture as a flahspoint, or maybe at least a starting point, in a recognition and activation of all subjects in this place as becoming.

 

–Lecture as non-normative part of critical education, and critical education as both revolutionary act and as aesthetic event ?

 

–Why do you crave this mode of interaction?  The performative, non-normative lecture as juxtaposed to the normative, straightforward lecture that I’ve now fallen back into?  And why crave lectures generally, even this one?  The lecture that is self-aware as such, and seeks to aestheticize itself such that dialogic elements pock it throughout, as well as this mode?

 

–Noted poet and essayist, and teacher Stan Apps wrote a response to my blog post regarding this question.  He writes as of yesterday:

 

This is a very interesting set of comments. Regarding Freire and American students, while you’re right that students enjoy the “spectacle” and “value” of the banking model, at the same time they might reject the other model because they don’t want to be liberated or deeply activated by the interaction with a professor. That can be, or seem, invasive to many students, who feel like they are obligated to come and often prefer to learn something specific and be unconfronted (unthreatened) by the professor’s ideology. After all, whether it’s true or not, American students tend to already feel liberated (since the idea of liberation is so basic to our culture), and that will lead them to reject the professor’s implication that they are not in fact liberated, which students might encounter as pessimistic or even disempowering.

 

–This is very much a Freirean response, and Stan meant it to be, as he, like so many of us in the arts and in education is very much dedicated to a Freirean model. 

 

–But I think that our situation—meaning the situation of students in late capitalist America—is sufficiently different enough for this to only ring partly true to me.

 

–I don’t know if it rings true to you

 

[ during Q&A some said it did, others not: one of you remarked that the lecture levels the playing field for further, more dialogic inquiry; another remarked that having a diversity of ways to learn or unlearn is good, so the lecture as merely one component is a positive thing ]

 

–I think it’s right that we often feel quite liberated and that this is a superstructure ideology, our false conscience, at work (Marx).  That sounds right.  I know I feel free to do what I want a lot of times.  But where this feeling comes from, and how free I am, is a deeply unsettling question.  Unsettling enough to not want to pose it to myself if I’m trying to get to sleep.

 

[ later we talked about some of the elements we weren’t aware of – conscious of – in the room, that might contribute to being “unfree” – the hierarchy of the way I stood and talked, controlled discussion, etc ]

 

Post-Lecture considerations/questions:

 

–But how does critical education, Freire being perhaps if not the founder of it, then its most celebrated co-founders, really work?  What are the nuts and bolts of the praxis of education, its dialogic elements? 

 

And how does this dialogic mode potentially square away with this lecture mode?  Or, in other words, how might banking education and dialogic question posing be not as different from one another as we might want? 

 

–One provisional answer is to be found in Socrates, to whom Freire looked to for inspiration, as much if not more than he looked to Marx:

 

 

Socrates: If I am right, certain professors of education must be wrong when they say that they can put a knowledge into the soul which was not there before, like sight into blind eyes. 

Glaucon: They undoubtedly say this.

 

Socrates: Whereas, our argument shows that the power and capacity of learning exists in the soul already; and that just as the eye was unable to turn from darkness to light without the whole body, so too the instrument of knowledge can only by the movement of the whole soul be turned from the world of becoming into that of being, and learn by degrees to endure the sight of being, and of the brightest and best of being, or in other words, of the good.

 

–Freire writes that the banking model does not, like education should, recognize subjects as in a constant state of becoming, the world not static, but malleable, changeable:

 

If the banking model is cast away…They (learners in dialog) may perceive through their relations with reality that reality is really a process, undergoing constant transformation.

–Freire, POP

 

–Freire calls the banking model one that assumes, as axiom, that persons are not copro consciente – conscious beings, but possesors of consciousness (one has it, one is not one and the same as it)

 

–Plato Continues the Dialog:

 

Glaucon: Very true.

 

Socrates: Each of you, when his turn comes, must go down to the general underground abode, and get the habit of seeing in the dark. When you have acquired the habit, you will see ten thousand times better than the inhabitants of the den, and you will know what the several images are, and what they represent, because you have seen the beautiful and just and good in their truth. And thus our State which is also yours will be a reality, and not a dream only, and will be administered in a spirit unlike that of other States, in which men fight with one another about shadows only and are distracted in the struggle for power, which in their eyes is a great good. Whereas the truth is that the State in which the rulers are most reluctant to govern is always the best and most quietly governed, and the State in which they are most eager, the worst….

When a person starts on the discovery of the absolute by the light of reason only, and without any assistance of sense, and perseveres until by pure intelligence he arrives at the perception of the absolute good, he at last finds himself at the end of the intellectual world, as in the case of sight at the end of the visible….

 

Because a freeman ought not be a slave in the acquisition of knowledge of any kind, bodily exercise, when compulsory, does no harm to the body; but knowledge which is acquired under compulsion obtains no hold on the mind.

 

Glaucon: Very true.

 

Socrates: Then, my good friend, do not use compulsion, but let early education be a sort of amusement; you will then be better able to find out the natural bent.

(Book 7, Cave Scene, The Republic)

 

 

—

 

The truth is, however, that the oppressed are not “marginals,” are not people living “outside” society. They have always been “inside” — inside the structure which made them “beings for others.” The solution is not to “integrate” them into the structure of oppression, but to transform that structure so that they can become “beings for themselves.” Such transformation, of course, would undermine the oppressors’ purposes; hence their utilization of the banking concept of education to avoid the threat of student conscientizacao.

—Freire, POP

–Here is where revolutionary education meets revolutionary politics on the tactical level, that is, where Freire is most explicit about his reliance on Marx and Fromm; education’s end is social revolution’s end; unlearning the ideology of the superstructure means tactically to reform “the base economy” – to set up a model in which the base economy, the vast majority of the producers (laborers, middle-class in some cases) has the greatest potential to realize that their values amount to false consciousness, that, for example, the desire for plasma screen televisions and the ability to get one one day through individual responsibility and hard work – this is the superstructure ideology of the ruling class, not the person’s “authentic” values, but the values the ruling class wants people to have.  Here, Fromm’s thesis, that of the necropheliac, or in Marx’s term, the person with false consciousness, is quoted:

“hence a threat to his possession is a threat to himself; if he loses possession he loses contact with the world. … He loves control, and in the act of controlling he kills life.” 

–An incredibly important, perhaps counterintuitive notion—it speaks to an understanding of community, indeed diversity, that isn’t integrative, and isn’t defined by bringing people into a commonality, but rather heightening difference, turning society less homogenous, less on common footing, and more heteronymous.  A definition of community and of diversity that is quite at odds with how these terms are used, for instance, here.

The banking approach to adult education, for example, will never propose to students that they critically consider reality. It will deal instead with such vital questions as whether Roger gave green grass to the goat, and insist upon the importance of learning that on the contrary, Roger gave green grass to the rabbit. The “humanism” of the banking approach masks the effort to turn women and men into automatons — the very negation of their ontological vocation to be more fully human.

 

—Freire, POP

 

Post-Lecture Considerations:

 

What sort of “subjects” would there be in Freirean education? 

 

Or, what is put at a premium here? 

 

How, if at all, does wrote memorization and the learning of systems—calculus, say, or chemistry—factor in? 

 

How would these subjects be treated in critical education circles?

 

–Taylor’s criticism: How can we tell the difference between the banking educational system and problem-posing?  I can pose problem after problem to you and all the while be steering you in the direction of capitalist values say, or more generally, my particular thesis on what we’re engaged in.

 

–In fact, the question-posing part of this performance of a standard western-world lecture is, in fact, steering you down one set of paths, asking of you to (even as performance) adopt certain ideological positions that aren’t, perhaps, yours (even as I attempt to simply outline what Freire and his proponents are thinking):

 

 Taylor allows me space to point out two further problems with Freire (potential problems):

 

1) the either/or writing here, i.e., that there is too much generality, such that without examples of how this dialogic process might work, it threatens to be identical to the banking model in outcome, and

 

2) it seems that for true problem-posing, dialogic learning to take place, many parts of the system beyond the classroom power dynamic need to be changed: tuition and teaching for pay would have to radically change or be thrown out; the idea of what a curriculum is would need overhauling—after all, a curriculum is a pre-ordered set of things to attend to, pre-established by an institution or a teacher; the idea of discrete subjects being taught would have to radically change—no more could we simply have a calculus course, for that would require that, even emerging by accident, or throughout the course of time during a dialogic process, an expert in calculus to emerge, a teacher who teaches, by way of imparting very particular knowledge.  A true dialog would thus entail widening “areas of discussion” (eg classes) to be much more general in nature, such that all would have an equal chance for equal contribution, drawing on different levels and sorts of expertise/experience, or all classes would involve co-learners all starting out with the same basic level of expertise in what they are discussing, thereby dissolving the need for a teacher in any normative sense of the word.  Which gets us back to Toscano’s organizational politics in CPT, which is very much influenced by Freire:

 

But still, what are we to make out of this “poetics” element

in “poetics theater” (PT). You might ask, “ok, why can’t the ‘poetics’

element of PT be made by a group of people (more than just RT)?”

And the answer to that is, it can, provided the participants have each

developed a poetics that is recognizable (in its political valence most of

all), so that a conjoining of poetics is a carefully honed negotiation

and not a watering down of each of the other.

–RT, “Strikes & Orgies”

 

Pos-Lecture Considerations:

 

–What other problems can you locate in Freire? (potential criticism, apparent contradiction, or conclusion that leads to further conclusions you find problematic)

 

–DISCUSSION OF QUESTIONS ABOVE AND BELOW–

 

–But then how would anyone become expert in any one, more narrow area of “study” – in order that co-learning/dialogic circles could arise? 

 

–Further observations about classroom-lecture setup that influence the educational process

 

–What counts here, in this space, as part of the “educational process”?

 

Can some of these criticisms be met (?), I think, if one understands Freire to be not as radical as we would like in some ways, yet more radical than given credit in others: to understand Freire to be really pushing for an aesthetics of education, that is, realizing and formulating ideas about education being an art practice. 

 

Plato is a main source of influence here.  The dialogs being not just philosophical inquiries and dialogs, but proto-theater, long polyvocal poems, in which the poet and the reader are on equal footing in the total exploration of a vast world, as well as in the ability to re-make the world, refashion it, change it—but are not on equal footing in all respects.  The artist has more control of the outcome of the dialog in virtue of making the art—calling attention to particular problems, starting the conversation, as it were, along a certain path. 

 

–Through Rancière: if we truly want to understand the aesthetics of pedagogy, we cannot simply see aesthetics as external to teaching and learning. Rather, education as an aesthetic event has to be taken seriously, and aesthetics should regain primacy in discussions of critical pedagogy.

 

–So we arrive at radical art being at the core of critical education. 

 

But how?  And why? 

 

We’ll look at this thru Ranciere, thru specific art-education movements, avant-garde American poetry, and very soon, go back in time bit more and look at Black Mountain School, Dewey, Arendt, and the alternative education movement, of which critical education is one school of thought among several that came up in 40s, 50s, and 60s, and influenced radical experiments that are contemporary, which we will also look at.

 

Dear All,

[ NOTE: STUDENTS NEW TO THIS BLOG, SCROLL BELOW FOR COURSE INFO! ]

If you can, please try to attend the Charles Bernstein reading tomorrow.  It’s not required, of course, but it is a really wonderful opportunity to hear one of the founding members of New York LANGUAGE poetry read & discuss. Bernstein has done as much as anyone to affect the way contemporary avant-garde text artists write. In case you can attend, here is the info:

Poet Charles Bernstein reads at Evergreen…

Tuesday, January 5th, noon, in Library 2205

Sponsored by Logopoesis and Performing Meaning

Born in 1950 in New York City, Charles Bernstein is the author of over forty books of poetry and poetics, and is a key figure in the Language Poetry movement started in the 1970′s.   The Donald T. Regan Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, Bernstein is famous for his brilliant avant garde work in diverse sites-in texts, in the university, on the internet, and on the streets. 

 Forthcoming in spring in 2010 is All the Whiskey in Heaven:  Selected Poems (Farrar, Straus and Giroux).  Other titles include Girly Man (University of Chicago Press, 2006); My Way:  Speeches and Poems  (University of Chicago Press, 1999); Content’s Dream (Sun & Moon, 1986); Islets / Irritations (Jordan Davies, 1983).  Bernstein is an elected Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and has received numerous awards, including a Guggenheim and a NEA.

 

Among Bernstein’s many poetry projects are his co-founding of the Poetics (Ph.D.) Program  and the Electronic Poetry Center at SUNY, Buffalo;  his co-editorship of the Modern and Contemporary Poetics series at the University of Alabama Press; his hosting of multiple LINEbreak and Close Listening poetry interviews; and his development of the internet audio poetry archive, PENNSound.