I have delayed my foray into writing narrative posts until well into the second week of class. I realize this is a somewhat risky venture because "modeling" is often encouraged in writing courses, and that would seem an important pedagogical tool in an experimental writing class in which students must write in a virtual medium. My deferral was not an act of procrastination, but rather a provocation for students to encounter blogging in a writing course on their own terms. I wanted to push to the surface the various challenges, frustrations, mistakes, grammatical and syntactic pitfalls, as well as the benefits and pleasures of writing without paper. At this point in the course, I contend that the first posts students wrote were generally better than the first formal papers I receive in an introductory writing course--perhaps this is a stroke of luck, but my hunch is that while I do have wonderful students, it may be more complicated than that. The posts are not flawless and I found myself making familiar comments on the posts (though the process felt different because my words were not relegated to the margins of the page), such as "be more specific" and "develop this point." However, most students were attentive to and deeply aware of their audience, and that almost never happens in the first paper.
Today in class, we discussed these issues and more; afterward, I realized that they are ready to see my attempts at a formal narrative post. Perhaps more accurately, I am ready for them to see my attempt. As I argue above, giving students "A" papers on which to model their own writing is a widely accepted practice in courses with heavy writing components; however, the key is that often, other (perhaps the instructor's previous) students serve as models. Maybe there are good reasons for the instructor not to compose an example of the writing she or he advocates, but in a class in which I am asking for them to accept a wider readership--one that extends beyond me--then it follows that my writing flows into the ether as well. Here it goes:
I am concerned with Lawrence Grossberg's explication of "Ideology" in New Keywords: A Revised Vocabulary of Culture and Society, in many ways because it assumes a fairly advanced knowledge of Marxist and Hegelian philosophy and the itineraries of more contemporary philosophers and theorists, such as Gramsci and Lukacs. There must be another way of writing about ideology that does not rehearse its very terms; that is to say, Grossberg's contribution to this anthology is in many ways highly ideological in its deployment of "high" theory, for example. I want to begin, however, with the lucid and useful points from his narrative. Notice from the OED definition to which I have linked that ideology begins with an idea; it is the "science of ideas." Grossberg mentions this too on p. 175 that "[i]deology [...] was the study of the origin and development of ideas." As he then traces, albeit somewhat confusingly, ideology later gets opposed to reasoned, rational, and realistic thinking. If someone is "ideological," he or she has been afflicted with illusory and imaginative thoughts that are not grounded in experience. Moreover, I appreciate his point on pp. 177-78 that late 20th-century politicians have returned, perhaps unknowingly, to this 18th and early 19th century conception of ideology as a form of idealism rather than rationalism. Notice how Jeffrey Hart accuses President Bush of being "ideological" in this article from The American Conservative. Toward the end of this article, Hart argues that Bush's justifications for invading Iraq were misguided, "some of his statements being so disconnected from actuality as to qualify as pure ideology." Pure ideology stands out significantly here because Hart is calling on a much earlier history of this term to denote unreasoned or impassioned thinking.
While my first impulse was to side with Hart that Bush is misguided, I quickly realized one of the dangers of reading and research online. These practices can offer an extremely narrow view depending on my key word search. "Bush" and "ideology" took me to this article, then pressing "ctrl F" took me to the paragraph in which I actually quite agree with Hart. However, I then investigated from what resource this article comes, and that is when things get more complicated. This article resides in a journal entitled The American Conservative. In its Mission Statement, the journal promises to reinvigorate conservatism: "We believe conservatism to be the most natural political tendency, rooted in man's taste for the familiar, for family, for faith in God." To borrow from Hart, this statement is "pure ideology" in its most insidious form, for it declares "conservatives" as logical, reasoned arbiters of "truth" who must also rely on their faith in God. Not only is this declaration illogical, it also demonstrates what Grossberg means by "It is always the other side--and never one's own--that has an ideology" (177). In other words, people often fail to detect their own ideologies and instead accuse others outside of their political, religious, national, familial (the list goes on) affiliation of being ideological, as Hart clearly does. Thus, the editor of The American Conservative fails to see how his "taste" for family and faith in God is ideological.
I want to take up further his word choice of "the familiar." From the sentence in which this term resides, I do not understand what he means. However, by examining his Mission Statement more closely, one can see a display of, dare I write conservative and, therefore, racist, forms of U.S. nationalism. He writes, "We believe that America has gained and still does from new immigrants. But we also, after two decades of intense immigration, believe that the nation needs a slowdown to assimilate those already here." It would seem that the "familiar" is a safe term for American, by which he means Euro-Americans whose families immigrated to the U.S. 200 years, not two decades, ago. Scott McConnell and the other authors of this statement could not have provided a better example of ideology, for this term can refer to a perception, judgment or prejudice that establishes a group's sense of what is right, normal, acceptable, and deviant. Conservatism, in other words, is an ideology that--for its adherents--appears universally applicable: faith in God does or should extend to every upstanding American citizen, for example.
Finally, I am writing this post in the moment of the 2008 Olympics in Beijing. Tomorrow in class, I want to broach this complicated keyword by examining discourse in the U.S. about the Olympics. Try Googling "olympics 2008 nationalism" and notice the top hits: they are articles and commentary on China's display of nationalism; by examining a few of these sites further, one might notice the general tone they strike. Overall, these digital authors seem to critique China for its overt nationalism during the games. Is this not the point of a city's and country's bidding for host of the Olympics? Are not the Olympics precisely about nationalizing sports to compete and defeat other nations in seemingly innocuous "games"? The hidden claim seems to be that China is being "ideological," which is another way of arguing that China is taking nationalism too far. The students and I will examine the ways in which the U.S. instead gets the gold medal in the game of nationalism.
Culture Clash
17 years ago
