Even If You Go to Everything, You'll Still Miss Most of It

Academic conferences can be like triple-tiered bookstores that taunt you with tomes you want badly to take home with you but can’t fit into the limits of your credit card (or the available time in your life).  RSA 2012 is a big tease in a bad way, with 20 options for each session slot and no breaks between sessions. If you want to eat, you have to miss something.  And you are already missing 95% of it just by virtue of having to make a choice, so if you come in 2014 pack some granola.

I chose the first session this morning because I was lured in by “Heidegger” in one of the paper descriptions, never mind that the panel was largely focused on Latour, about whom I know next to nothing. Much of this hour went right over my head, although I did scribble frantically things to look up later. I say that honestly, because I think there is a danger in having to pretend, as grad students, that we know all of these theorists inside and out – a danger to ourselves via our mental health, that is. The beauty of metacognition and the accessibility of information in 2012 is that as long as we know what we don’t know, we can eventually get around to knowing it, preferably post-quals.  

It doesn’t help, however, if your notes say this:

Heidegger

Tool analysis…tool environment humans

Manifold assignments, all possibilities in the situation

Human engagement  is relations constructed by totality of equipment

Objects become rhetorical when? Bind us map public space

Relationality

and when midnight comes ‘round and you try to blog about them you have no idea why you wrote that or what you wanted to say about it.  The most fabulous of those cryptic notes is “bind us map public space” and I might make a haiku out of that some day. Anyone who takes a stab at it and posts it in a comment will receive a free éclair from the Reading Terminal Market (purchased by Chris Andrews).  If you don’t win a free éclair but happen to be in Philly, please stop by RTM and get one for $4. It is better than the Doubletree cookie.

On a more serious note, however, some fascinating ideas that came out of this session did manage to stick for me. The first of these is the question of the agency of objects, as objects are always doing things we don’t understand without even our knowledge of them doing those things (Things are happening in our pockets without our knowledge, according Alex Reid (SUNY Buffalo).) The speakers were talking specifically about mobile technology, but this struck a chord with me in regards to the headscarf as well. I maintain that the veil is a technology, and I can certainly imagine how it might do things the wearer and observer do not understand, even while it is performing certain functions they do understand like limiting the gaze and enacting modesty. I’m more interested, however, in the agency the veil has outside of the functions assigned by humans.

Speaking of the veil, I felt compelled to also take in a session that included a paper called “Re-Framing the Veil: Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis as Comic Corrective” by

Christopher Basgier (Indiana University). In addition to confirming for me the contradictions and multiple meanings attached to the veil in both Western and Islamic discourse, Basgier’s discussion highlighted via Burke’s Comic Corrective the ambivalent attitude some women – especially those from Muslim majority countries – have toward the veil, when there is an impossibility to fully accept or fully reject the veil in its totality. Something that especially stood out for me from Basgier’s presentation was a brief note he made about the margins between the frames, the gutters between the pictures.  That is where we, the readers, perform closure.  I wondered here, upon hearing this, if that is what I do when I piece together narrative fragments scattered across websites. Are each of the artifacts I work with a frame? Am I performing closure work in the gutters? And if so, am I getting the story right?

I worry a great deal about speaking for my hijabi sisters via my analysis of the artifacts they produce. A 3^rd session today, one on Intersectionality, reinforced this fear for me. Malea Powell (MSU) discussed reframing legitimizing narratives, emphasizing especially the work that needs to be done on training graduate students to work with and teach not only “real rhetoric” but also indigenous rhetorics that currently seem to exist only in silos. She quoted Lee M? : “There is a story in every theory.” My hope is not to let the story in the theory overshadow the story in the narrative.  Also in this panel, David Wallace (UCF) offered 10 Principles Guiding the Teaching and Practice of Rhetoric and Composition. They were each useful, but #4 “Engaging in Responsible Rhetorical Agency must be rooted in an understanding of identity as multiple and contested” and #9 “We must account for differences in our trajectories in moving toward rhetorical agency that embraces intersectionality” each seem particularly relevant for my work. I am hyperaware of the multiple, contested identities of the women I study. I am aware of the varied trajectories. My concern is in the messiness that makes for my research and how adept I’ll be when working through that intersectionality in my dissertation.

Good stuff here in Philly. Quite a lot to chew on. More buffet tomorrow.