A Sonic Project by Josh Losoya
1 Introduction 4:23
Introduction
[The audio recording for this introduction includes the following text read aloud over soft, atmospheric keyboard chords. There are also occasional trickling harp sounds that emerge from the background of the music]
The following project was composed during my final year in graduate school for my master’s degree in composition and rhetoric. During my spring semester, I took a “Writing Program Issues” course, and it was here that this project came into being. Now this introductory narrative piece, of course, was not a part of the original collection, but in order to give a more coherent context to the work presented, I would like to briefly introduce it.
This project, titled “Sounds from the Programmed,” is a creative (meta)performance, and it attempts to synthesize some of the major writing program issues present in the field of composition and rhetoric, particularly focusing on the work of Thomas Rickert, Paul Lynch, Jody Shipka, Elizabeth Ellsworth, and Jonathan Alexander and Jacqueline Rhodes. The project primarily brings together ideas on embodiment in the composition classroom and postpedagogical theory in an attempt to perform an extension of both for rhetoric and composition scholars. The work seeks to explore the extent to which the writing program and composition classroom should come to terms with their material situated-ness within the institutionalizing forces of the university and the affective outcomes of such a “programmed” situation, while also highlighting the theoretical significance of such an angst-ridden awareness of the field’s bureaucratic enmeshment. Finally, from a more abstract level, the work itself strives to provide an alternative for what can be considered scholarship within (and hopefully beyond) the composition classroom, as it attempts to embody what Rickert calls an “Act.” The work’s performative existence—as a collection of songs with footnoted lyrics and a goofy yet sincere podcast submitted for grading within a graduate “Writing Program Issues” course—is as theoretically significant to the field, in my mind, as its explicit discussion of the theories at hand.
A brief structural overview: the work consists primarily of two components. Component 1 is a podcast-like digital essay that explores a specific writing program issue: “What the content of a first-year writing course should be.” This work, however, foreshadows some of the themes to come, as my performance of “student-author” at times cynically plays with the medium (using DJ airhorns and parodying an NPR intro), while nevertheless remaining sincerely committed to using the space to address the question at hand. Component 2 includes two digitally recorded songs and a word document that includes the lyrics to those songs, lyrics which are densely footnoted to articulate (in the bottom margins of the page) arguments that would not fit into the verses of the songs themselves. The first song, “Grade Me,” attempts to give voice to the anxiety of a student who is inhabiting the angsty space of graded-coursework (as discussed in Thomas Rickert’s Acts of Enjoyment). Though, it also, at a more abstract or explicit level, allowed this former graduate-student/performer to literally state “grade me” as an anxiety-inducing imperative in the classroom context. The second song, “Ballad of the Writing Instructor,” outlines the mindset of a writing instructor who is questioning their position in the classroom in the wake of postpedagogical theory (semi-autobiographical). And finally, the footnoted lyrics use the medium of textual argumentation to claim that what Paul Lynch calls the “Tuesday morning question” implicitly glosses over the air of angst that postpedagogical theory induces. I, instead, put forward the “Wednesday morning question,” which directly embraces these anxieties and uncertainties as both theoretically and affectively significant, essentially asking, “What am I doing here, and what did I ever think I could do here?” The project closes by acknowledging itself as a work contextually situated within the imperative to be graded, hoping that such a gesture serves, itself, as what Rickert theorizes and calls for in Acts of Enjoyment—an Act.
[The recording closes with a sudden transition to a fast-paced arpeggio of the previous chords that slowly fades out]
2 The Content Question: A Digital Essay 4:46
The Content Question: A Digital Essay
[The recording opens with a glitchy and effects-laden voice stating, “You’re listening to: Writing Program Issues—Digital Essays,” followed by a series of DJ airhorns. A “breaking-news”-type recording plays in the background as the narrator sets up the piece]
Hi. I’m Josh Losoya. There are a number of questions surrounding the first-year writing course. What is good writing? Who should teach writing? And is writing something that can even be taught? However, I found myself particularly interested in the question of what content the first-year writing course should consist of. While there are a number of stakeholders involved, I was specifically interested in what students thought they should be reading and writing about in the course. To find out, I did what any academic researcher would do: I ran around campus and accosted people with a microphone. Now, I’m by no means implying that the sounds I’ve collected in this sort of quasi-experiment are representative or empirical in any way, but, instead, I hope to show the kinds of ideas that people around campus already have. I’m making no causal claims, nor any statistical predictions, but I hope this can, instead, serve as a kind of digital-map for the thoughts of others and myself on the topic.
[The “breaking-news” track fades out and a cheery marimba tune begins to set up a playful yet contemplative atmosphere]
One of the first questions I decided to ask was what a writing class is. As 19-year-old Student A explained: “you write a lot.” Realizing I needed to move my questioning outward more, I asked others, instead, why they thought a first-year writing class was a requirement. As 21-year-old Student B noted: “Umm, I think it gives people a good base, umm, kind of knowledge of the English language and writing in general. I think that’s an important skill.” However, there wasn’t a clear consensus on this question. 18-year-old Student C had slightly different thoughts on the first-year writing requirement: “Hmm, I really don’t think it should be a requirement. As, if you’re 18, I think that you should know basic English to communicate with each other, but in an English 103 class . . . unless you’re an English major, I think it should be required, because they do a lot of communication, and writing.”
After getting a feel for people’s initial thoughts, I decided it was time to ask my big question—what they thought the content of a first-year writing class should consist of/what students should be reading and/or writing about during the course. Here are some of my initial responses:
[The marimba track fades out and a compilation of “uh” sounds play over the Jeopardy theme-song, followed by an airhorn sound].
They weren’t too sure, and, to be frank, I’m not sure I’d have anything clearly to say either if I were put on the spot. But, after taking some time to work through what they thought a first-year writing class should be doing, I got some pretty interesting answers:
[Throughout response recordings, ambient campus-sounds can be heard (e.g., birds and clock tower chimes)]
Student C—“I think they should be focused on everyday life. Not literature. Like news articles. Stuff like that.”
Student B—“I think it should cover, uh, fundamentals of writing, and maybe get into more of the writing that you use on a daily basis. Maybe email composition and things of that nature.”
I continued to ask around campus to see if I could get any other varying perspectives. 27-year-old Student D explained her thoughts on the content question: “Well, I think incorporating current topics would be something, um, that would be interesting, and obviously writing, but [laughs] I don’t know what else.” My final interviewee, 18-year-old Student E, explained her thoughts on the content as foundation building: “I guess just like provide a basis for like the rest of our English classes. Like essays on like personal experience or like argumentative papers. Things like that.”
[A slowed-down groove-song plays quietly at a high pitch as the work concludes]
While there wasn’t a commonality between the responses that I directly put my finger on, it did seem that all those interviewed thought the first-year writing course should choose content that introduced them to academic discourse. This could include theories on how students write or how to identify and engage with scholarly sources. How to do research, but, more importantly, how to use writing in real-life scenarios. Students B, C, and D all noted a need for skills applicable to the everyday, whether this be critical literacy of news publications or how to compose an email. This is, I must admit, a content inclusion I’ve traditionally overlooked when imagining the first-year writing course, or one that I’ve at least taken for granted. However, at the end of the day, each student comes into the classroom with varying expectations, and what interested my five interview participants clearly won’t apply to students in every first-year writing classroom. One thing I did learn, however, is that, experienced or not, every student has a firm hope for what they can get out of their first-year writing course, and, perhaps, the best thing we can do as educators is take the time to listen. Thank you for listening.
[The song fades out]
3 Grade Me 3:10
Grade Me[1]
[Airy chords play in the distance as the song opens. Woozy chimes with temporal distortion come in, followed by a glitchy tone. The glitch leads to a full, somber ensemble of a slow-moving bass, a clean, finger-picked guitar melody, and ringing, bell-sounding keyboard chords. The vocals begin with a full, lamenting tone.]
Grade me. Give my growing mind a letter.
Grade me. Free my thoughts with numbered fetters. [2]
[A sliding and echoing guitar riff begins as the bell chimes double in pace]
How do you expect us to accept that you came here to set us free
from inside these ivory prison cells?
And tell me which of our readings will relieve my fear of leaving with no job.
To think I pay to be here.[3]
[The glitch sound returns, transitioning to the chorus: a mood of minor vocal harmonies, echoing guitar riffs, and an uncertain, high-pitched keyboard chime, reverberating throughout]
Get your jouissance out ‘my face.[4]
This is no place to write on thoughts and space and composition.
See things from our position.
My loans are piling, and I’ve grown weary from job-fair smiling
How do your theories help build my résumé?
[The tones that opened the song begin again. A clip of Student C’s voice from “The Content Question: A Digital Essay” plays twice] I really don’t think it should be a requirement. I think they should be focused on everyday life [“everyday life” glitches into a loop of repeats and reverberations. The chorus tones return.]
Get your jouissance out ‘my face.
This is no place to write on thoughts and space and composition.
See things from our position.
My loans are piling and I’ve grown weary from job fair smiling
How do your theories help build my résumé?
[The other tones stop as the airy atmosphere that opened the song slowly fades out]
[1] This initial piece attempts to adopt the voice of a disillusioned student on the verge of what Thomas Rickert, in his Acts of Enjoyment, refers to as an “Act,” or that which “is interested in rupturing the day, in transforming the entire discursive field that determines what is proper and valued” (194). As the verses apply and explore this concept, Rickert’s work will simultaneously be utilized via footnotes to explore the synthesis of praxis and theory at play.
[2] As Rickert claims, “whatever the content of the course, evaluation still serves to initiate students into the competitive, hierarchically structured job market they will soon face. The writing classroom thereby perpetuates the continuation of practices of valuation and exclusion, often, as is the case with radical, cultural studies-based pedagogies, the very same practices that are being challenged” (180). It is not merely that the writing classroom is institutionalized or programmed, but, rather, that in existing within both a program and institution, the course is required to evaluate and hierarchically organize the output and ideas of students grappling with the course material. Even a deeply personal insight brought about within a student, if occurring in the classroom setting, becomes complexly implicated, something potentially marked and given a superficial value (whether this be via a participation grade or a journal entry grade). Such deprives the student’s learning moment (perhaps a moment of autodidactic development) of its initial authenticity, instead utilizing it as an affirmation and component of the existing classroom and educational institution.
[3] Insofar as education has been integrated into neoliberal capitalism as a commodity (whether in the public or private, secondary or post-) it has become an institutionalized, programmed, and bureaucratized force. It serves as a space for assisting students in their transition from household to global workforce, and in being institutionalized, implicitly promises it preparatory nature—floating as an aura around the university with increasing tuition is the assurance that time spent studying will adequately prepare investors (parents/students) with professional preparation for the existing job market. As Rickert observes, “Asking students to take a critical attitude toward, say, advertising, does little to dissolve advertising’s persuasive power, but it does provide yet another forum in which they will be evaluated and ranked, a procedure that is most useful for their future employment opportunities. The language game of criticism seldom attains the level of personal affect because students understand all too well that their writing ultimately only services their own continued servitude” (191).
[4] Rickert defines jouissance as “not so much simple enjoyment of pleasure, but its excess” as it “makes everything we do worthwhile” (20). It is in this sense he observes that while he derives pleasure from teaching critical/cultural studies, his students often derive pleasure form the artifacts he requests they deconstruct. It is in the face of educator-derived-jouissance itself, however, (non-specified to any particular pedagogy) that this student is resisting. If the classroom is complexly situated and hegemonically implicated by oppressive institutions, should it be a place for any form of jouissance? Deriving jouissance from a self-motivated learning process remains distinct from deriving it from a directed one—or so this hypothetical student would put forward.
[5] Figure 1 depicts a used paper bag where the initial draft of the song’s lyrics were drafted. Jody Shipka, in her Toward a Composition Made Whole, strives to write against “narrow definitions of technology [as they] fail to encourage richly nuanced views of literacy by ignoring the wide variety of technologies—both new and not-so-new—informing the production, reception, circulation, and valuation of texts” (40). I seek to highlight this point in order to stress the multimodal (technological) existence of this project. Although the songs are digital and audio-based and this lyrical-exposition is textual, the act of composing the work was not strictly digital—when sitting with my guitar (situated physically both in my room and with my instrument) I realized that I wanted to record ideas for a verse and chorus as soon as possible, and, with a notepad nowhere in sight, I proceeded to document this moment of situated invention on the ripped portion of a used paper bag. In this sense, this project is highly situated in a network of materials and technologies that exceed merely the audio files and this textual document. It had a physical life as well—via guitar strings and paper bag scrawlings. (Also, fun fact: This picture was taken in the dorms of the 2017 RSA Institute in Bloomington, IN.)
4 Ballad of the Writing Instructor 5:07
Ballad of the Writing Instructor[1]
[An effects-free acoustic guitar plays a progression of minor chords to open the piece. The guitar and vocals seem hesitant. The full vocal-tone of “Grade Me” has moved to a softer, if not more wavering, performance of voice]
I got in this business
and business I do mean[2]
cause I liked learning new things,
autodidactically[3]
Was just a lonely bookworm
And now I’m doing this teaching thing
But I’m getting paid[4]
and they’re[5] getting by
and I wonder why
I ever thought
We could change
the world inside a room
the world inside a room
where kids are forced to sit down
and face where I direct
frontward, groups, or circled,
their dreams still they protect[6]
‘Cause they’ve got fantasies
they’ve got things to see
they’ve got homes to feed
And they’ve got classrooms to leave [7]
Now I’m older still,
and yet not happy here
cause there’re no more easy answers[8]
and now I’m choking when I “teach”[9]
It’s the Wednesday morning question[10]:
Should I still show up? What’s there to give up?
What are our hopes and aims?
Our class objectives so selected by me?
[The final chord echoes for a moment and is held until it is almost silent]
[The acoustic begins again, this time with major chords and a tempo twice as fast. The tone is more positive, if not comparatively manic. The vocal tone is tighter, yet more assertive.]
You might be wondering how’d I get my thinking here?
Well let me show you some thinkers who helped me to think clear.[11]
[The vocal become increasingly fast-paced]
Thomas Rickert said, maybe postmodern cynicism isn’t naturally developed through our cultural experiences and maybe our critical pedagogies are contributing to this all
Let’s see clearly and look at how it is we’re forcing them to act out in our classrooms
Though I’d like to add the significance of the situated-ness of the classroom itself, but I’ll hold off on that.[12]
Now think towards Alexander and Rhode’s multimodal thoughts where they say, “give them computers and maybe teach them code.”[13]
But I thought: “Holy Shit [sudden acoustic silence]. There’re people jumping from Foxconn buildings[14] that are Apple makers. We buy dead people when we buy these multimodes.”
Who says Prosumers will create critical objects that they’ll relay to the world?[15]
[The acoustic strumming speeds up aggressively, as do the vocals]
Lest we forget ol’ Rickert.
But Paul Lynch says if that don’t work, then fuck it cause there’s always Tuesday.[16]
Grade me. Grade me. Grade me. Grade me.[17]
If this is not an Act then I give up.[18]
[1] This piece attempts to put forward an implicit affective argument regarding the place both educators and pedagogy find themselves in a postpedagogical context. Although work such as Paul Lynch’s After Pedagogy attempts to find a way to inhabit the space of angst and anxiety onset by this (post)pedagogical turn, I claim that such a sudden move neglects to emphasize (or necessarily wallow in, perhaps) the affective despair that postpedagogical theories can serve to put forward. In doing so, it evades a further contemplation of the situated sources of this affective disillusionment that, I claim, can be primarily linked to the process of institutionalizing learning itself.
[2] Teaching as business—nothing new here.
[3] While I cannot verify this with statistics or philosophical arguments, of those career-educators I have encountered (and they are relatively rare) who enter into the profession for the joy of sharing in the learning process more so than the content or (limited) privileges afforded, most appear to enter the field from a personal drive towards learning, an autodidacticism (again, this is an anecdotal claim). This, of course, does not apply to all educators. However, more often than not, it seems to me those in the classroom for the love of teaching itself have a close relation to experiencing and desiring to share autodidactic drives.
[4] Whether via state funding or student paid tuition, educators in institutional systems are compensated (albeit often poorly in the public sector) for their time in the classroom.
[5] “They” being students.
[6] As Thomas Rickert notes in Acts of Enjoyment, “[T]he notion that we can actually foster resistance through teaching is questionable” (164). This all (the classroom as an institutional site and commodity, the non-liberatory possibilities of pedagogy, and the evaluation economy inherent to this structure, along with many other factors) places the contemporary classroom in a highly problematic (and in some ways painful) situation/position.
[7] Even as Elizabeth Ellsworth, in her Places of Learning, contends for learning outside the conventional class, this too serves to widen the scope of what can be considered the institutionalized “classroom” environment. What Ellsworth fails to stress, I claim, is the extent to which institutionalized learning is distinct from an autodidactic pursuit of knowledge. She claims, “Bodies have affective somatic responses as they inhabit a pedagogy’s time and space . . . Because this experience arises out of an assemblage of mind/brain/body with the time and space of pedagogy, we must approach an investigation into the experience of learning self through that assemblage” (4-5). I wholly concur that learning is embodied and situated. However, this also assumes that we can (theoretically) get all bodies affectively invested in our content and that this is a desirable end. And yet, if the affects students will experience during the course are complexly entangled with the commodified, authoritarian (in an evaluative sense), and institutional practices, perhaps it would remain best to allow Learning to occur in a space not colonized by the “learning-institution.” That is, perhaps we can only hope to inhabit educational roles that are simultaneously realistic about the situated-ness of institutional-education yet empathetic towards its outcomes, to be receptive toward the Act.
[8] Things seemed so easy as an undergraduate—What kind of pedagogue am I? Critical. Time to teach!
[9] In a statement from my personal experience, I very sincerely began to inhabit the role of educator with a newfound anxiety after experiencing postpedagogical theory—very literally standing in front of my class with the questions “what am I doing up here?” and “what did I ever think I could do up here?” It is in this sense that it seems much of postpedagogical theory (although I focus particularly on Rickert’s work here, this is not a sentiment limited to Acts of Enjoyment) inspires this somewhat melancholic attitude towards the role of the contemporary educator within the institution. Lynch alludes to such implicitly when stating the aim of his book: “When I’m asking about the sustainability of postpedagogy, I do not mean to ask how it can be turned into a program. I mean to ask how I can inhabit the attitudes that postpedagogy encourages” (51).
[10] For me, Lynch neglects to fully acknowledge the emotional exigence for his own work. He briefly hints at such when alluding to “the attitudes that postpedagogy encourages” (51). However, I see Lynch as too quickly brushing over the melancholia that postpedagogical theories can and should draw over the profession. Although it is great to quickly think a way out of the dread and anxiety of these theories, I find it more beneficial to pause and ponder briefly that which we need to be capable of enduring. What does an after-pedagogy help us inhabit? Why do we need a pedagogy that helps us inhabit attitudes at all? Furthermore, have we given up on collaboratively working on Monday’s lesson plans altogether? It seems Lynch assumes an audience of experienced (post-Monday) educators, yet for those who have yet to have a full Monday, an after-pedagogy provides little to conceptualize approaches to the content of the field itself, merely a disposition to the role of teacher.
[11] Thinking/seeing “clearly” is a poor metaphor here, but it worked lyrically. Oops.
[12] I have attempted to do this here via footnotes (my success in doing so may, however, be questionable).
[13] Not an actual quote.
[14] It has been widely reported that at facilities such as China’s “Foxconn City,” a mass-industrial facility that produced technology for both Apple and HP, suicides reached such high levels that Foxconn placed nets around the buildings windows to keep workers from jumping to their death. The point being made here is that although new-media technology may afford rhetorical means not available via pencil and pen, it is inherently and complexly tied into abuses of human workforces, flows of capital, mining of resources, and cyclical consumerism. But to what end? An endorsement of a technology-based multimodalism, at some level, endorses the trajectory implied by technology’s current developments—AI, human-technology synthesis, the ubiquity of privileged technological commodities, etcetera. These are endorsements, however, that the students themselves have not explicitly reached a consensus upon, even if utilizing these materials in their everyday lives.
[15] See, for example, Alexander and Rhode’s discussion of Daniel Anderson’s work (13).
[16] Pardon my language. The point here, however, is that an after-pedagogy seems to very strategically side-step a number of highly significant and complex questions brought forward by postpedagogical theory.
[17] Literally. Give this a grade. It is an obliged response within which we (both those performing student and educator—you and I) are both trapped and implicated. A? B+? C?
[18] Meta.
Alexander, Jonathan, and Jacqueline Rhodes. On Multimodality: New Media in Composition Studies. Urbana, IL, Conference on College Composition and Communication/National Council of Teachers of English NCTE, 2014.
Ellsworth, Elizabeth. Places of Learning: Media, Architecture, Pedagogy. Routledge/Falmer, 2005.
Lynch, Paul. After Pedagogy: the Experience of Teaching. Urbana, IL, Conference on College Composition and Communication/National Council of Teachers of English NCTE, 2013.
Rickert, Thomas. Acts of Enjoyment: Rhetoric, Žižek, and the Return of the Subject. U of Pittsburgh P, 2007.
Shipka, Jody. Toward a Composition Made Whole. U of Pittsburgh P, 2011.