Rainy day coffee shop notes...
In random order (since everything is random in my life right now).
I don't think it is too far of a stretch to understand the obsession with the amount of labor as being a determining in the level of quality in art and literature as a byproduct of Lockeian notions of the value of property...that is, the more labor that is applied to the property, the more value it has. Interestingly, a similar notion, the Labor Theory of Value, seems to also apply. That is, the more effort that is put into a commodity, the more value it contains. This helps to explain the obsession that many artists seem to have (that is, you have to pay your dues and put a ton of effort into something for it to be worth something).
But, and I'm fascinated with this, it seems to also have bled into composition classes where we require students to write and then revise the living hell out of any document...the idea being that more work always equals higher quality.
Of course, this isn't true. It isn't true for Art and it isn't true for writing. As Joseph Kossuth notes in his essay Art After Philosophy,
"The 'value' of particular artists after Duchamp can be weighed according to how much they questioned the nature of art; which is another way of saying 'what they added to the conception of art' or what wasn't there before they started. Artists question the nature of art by presenting new propositions as to art's nature. And to do this one cannot concern oneself with the handed-down 'language' of traditional art, as this activity is based on the assumption that there is only one way of framing art propositions. But the very stuff of art is indeed greatly related to 'creating' new propositions."
What I find most interesting is what Kossuth is doing is still appealing to the L.T.V., in a sense, but what he is not doing is locating the value of labor within the finished product. To Kossuth, it wasn't that Duchamp labored for years to learn how to write "R. Mutt" on a urinal. What matters is that Duchamp added a new layer to the existing idea of art.
The lesson I think that can be translated to writing classes is that it isn't the amount of labor that you add to your paper to make it "perfect," "clean," or, "polished" that matters because those sorts of goals only reinforce a forgone conclusion or form. Rather, what adds value to a paper is what sorts of ideas can be added to the pre-existing notion of writing both within each individual student as well as within the larger socio-cultural sphere.
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Teaching as performance, student as performance.
Geoff Sirc reminded me of a scene in the movie "Five Easy Pieces" where Jack Nicholson plays a beautiful piece on the piano and the female lead stands in awe until she says "wow, that was beautiful" in a nearly post-orgasmic way.
Nicholson's response? "Naw, I faked a little and then you faked a little."
Geoff's idea was that this is a kind of analogy for how a lot of instruction happens. I like to think of it as the BS factor. Students BS things in the paper and then we BS things back to them in a response. Cynical? Yeah, very. But it is almost beautiful in a very Nietzsche sort of way...
The question is...how do you begin to approach the authentic composition - response dynamic? Are students saying what they feel on their papers and in their responses to me? Or are they saying what they think I want to hear and am I responding as though I don't know what they are saying is total bullshit? Or, how do you get around the academic con-job that is going all over the place? (and don't deny that it is...i have 20 years of personal experience in education that tells me that more times than not...it is a BS job not an authentic product of intellectual expression...mostly because I've been the BS-er...the con-artist in whatever response my instructor asks of me. I know how to work the system).
I have no answers. None. Just questions.
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Responding to creative work...or the impossibility of such.
We all know and love (sarcastically, at least) the creative writing workshop. But after reading Spingarn's early essay on 'the new criticism,' I'm beginning to seriously doubt the potential a creative writing workshop has.
If we are to accept Spingarns conclusion that the only genre or form is that of expression (that is, genre or form is something that happens after the moment of expression and that expression exists with out any sort of formalist boundaries), then it seems you cannot separate form from content. Form is content in the most radical way. (it is only through revision that most times content is bastardized to fit a pre-conceived notion of what genre or form it should resemble...but that is a whole other rant.)
This becomes problematic in the workshop, though. Typically, we ask people to respond to others work. But to what are we really responding to? To use an overly extreme example, say someone wrote some sort of piece on their rape. What can you respond to? Most people would say that you cannot respond to the rape itself (i mean, honestly, could you imagine putting yourself in the position to say "well, I'm sorry but your rape just wasn't dramatic enough to hold my attention..."). With out being able to respond on this level, we almost always revert to form...that is...how can you relate your rape better.
But if form is an extension of content, we can't do this either. Our response to the form is a response to the rape itself. Or, we are asking the form to not be true to the content. And we cannot comment on the rape itself because, as an expression, it is only meaningful on a form level to the author themselves. We were not there and it is not our experience so there is no way for us to know what the best form for such content would be.
At best, we can only offer our response that is 2 to 3 times removed from the experience itself. It seems that then, while it might be interesting, anything we have to say is woefully inadequate to say anything meaningful in terms of "bettering" the piece. Our response is, in this regard, only meaningful to ourselves.
The danger is, of course, to perpetuate the idea that reader responses are somehow meaningful at the level of artistic production. They are not. They mean nothing during the actual moment of conception and execution. These sorts of discussions are only useful to others in order to classify and marginalize the work into genres that can be studied using whatever version of literary criticism we choose to employ.
Again...no answers...only questions.