Alexis's response to Arola & Wysocki

[Larsson, Anna]

#429

“These scholars are not arguing for us to do away with books, of course, for they make their arguments in books–but they do ask what other sorts of arguments are possible when we broaden our senses of the texts we can make for each other through the possibilities of the digital. What might be possible if we encouraged a democracy of the sense in our teaching instead of a hegemony of sight?(7)”

This questions resonates with me because it gets at a problem I’ve been thinking about. It seems to me that other industries and institutions apart from the university system have noticed that we have bodies and senses and we like to engage them, and that engaging them has something to do with how we construct ourselves and our relation with/among our surroundings. We have magazines that encourage us to craft and consume along a pathway to an aesthetic of home, and I tend toward the critical side of ambivalence on this phenomenon.

I like making things with people (I’m thinking of craft parties), but I suspect that some of the ways advertising and home-making media fall out of the range of critical engagement, making it just the sort of blind spot where hegemony and personal fantasy get involved with each other. So, consumer culture (should I put “scare quotes” on this term?) encourages us to use our senses, toward even a sensual hegemony, to follow our sight into spaces where our bodies are further mediated and regimented,yes, but at least they get to be present, contra the “self-invisible” domain of professional writing. This, consumer culture, is a more useful parallel to draw than with sports or recreational classes or hiking communities or any of the other ways that we can engage with others in an embodied way–those ways have less to do with composition, with writing, with the effects on cognition of these forms of embodiment.

“Anthropologists Constance Classen and David Howes . . . have . . . descrived the sensuous hierarchies of other cultures in other times and other places–with, instead of sight, some cultures privileging hearing, smell, or a sense of heat as the primary epistemological sense–and they have told of the mortal consequences that can result when cultures with different sensuous epistemologies and cosmologies come up against each other” (6). Really, I’m interested in the way the line just quoted offers us “sensuous epistemology” as a term to describe the “hegemony of sight” as one among a variety of alternatives. I might also speculate that the sensuous epistemology of sight, the hegemony of sight, is not as rigidly maintained outside of the university as it is within it. We’ve seen a number of best sellers on diet and food come out over recent years, and home improvement has become an American tradition, no? Is this not a way of recovering, or at least fumbling with, intimate, domestic agency, proprioceptive agency? I’m suspicious of any suggestion that universities are keeping up with the realities lived outside of them, and this, too, concerns the “hegemony of sight.” I’d like to see the media criticism cited by Arola and Wysocki (Benjamin, Adorno & Horkheimer, Enzensberger, Baudrillard) set alongside similar forms of inquiry regarding public spaces, fantastic spaces (like Baudrillard on Disneyland), and food culture. I wonder if it would be useful to conceive of some of our multimodal work in comp/rhet as work to increase agency in these other senses. While I’m thinking about this, however, I’m not taking into account Arola and Wysocki’s treatment of Marx’s concept of alienation. I haven’t thought deeply enough about it to see how it applies, but I have considered, here, the distinction between passive and active that runs through the text. If part of writing is moving from passive to active in the way our experience/embodiment is mediated, why not also think about alternatives, alternate purposes, and genre in regard to our “life worlds”? As a side note, I think “life worlds” is a term I picked up from a text by Kurt Spellmeyer, but I’m not sure I’m using it correctly, so if you’d like to correct me about this please do

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