Thinking Inside the Box, Persuading Your Students Toward Uncertainty

Though our two readings for this week offer dramatically different models for the composition classroom, both firmly challenge the notion that the goal of the composition class is to teach students how to write classical argumentative essays.

In “Box Logic,” Geoffrey Sirc explores artists who have used “the logic of the box” in order to compose collections of objects  they find “materially interesting.” With each example, Sirc demonstrates how obssessions with “suggestive objectives” that together eschew notions of “articulate coherence, conventional organization, and extensive development” can translate into the composition classroom as well.  Using box logic, students no longer compose essays but instead become “passionate designers” with “heart and soul as compositional factors that need as much attention as hand, eye, or brain.” Eventually, the reader discovers that while the artists he sites created literal boxes and curio cabinets full of tangible objects, Sirc encourages students to instead compose digital archives of odds ‘n ends that they find here, there, and everywhere.  The point is to create open-ended texts that are “raw” and “not cooked” and that playfully explore the nooks and crannies of the author’s (and eventually the viewer’s) curiosities and obsessions.  Such assemblages create networks of materials that represent “lived texts of desire” in order to aesthetsize the scene of composition, as Sirc notes. In the end, Sirc believes students will have a greatly expanded notion of composition and its relation to the “institutional space that enframes the human scene of written expression.”  And he focuses on the skills of practicing search strategies and annotating material in order to develop a celebration of the “basic image” and seeing perception as a “performative gesture.”

 I find Sirc’s approach immensely fascinating.  First, it reminds me of the type of object oriented rhetoric  that Jane Bennett discusses in her article “The Force of Things: Steps Toward an Ecology of Matter” (2004), which argues for a recognition of thing-power – the “vitality, willfulness, and recalcitrance [of] nonhuman entities and forces.” This kind of attention to the details and interactions of the million tiny things that compose our everyday existence is an exciting process. Have you ever made a collage or began to think about the “designed” elements of life? Have you ever juxtaposed two essentially unlike things in a space in your apartment? This stuff is fun and addicting. And Sirc wants students to get addicted to the process too. Second, I think annotation and note-taking are really important skills that are difficult to teach in the composition classroom. Students seem to miss the point of why they are doing it the first place, and I think it becomes a boring, required exercise for many of them.  I also realized while reading this piece that this type of box logic was precisely what I wanted my students to develop in their first essays when  I asked them to select an artifact – a song, a book, a memory, an event  -- that has inspired them in the past. The problem, of course, comes after they select the artifact. What do you DO with it? I think Sirc answers this question. You arrange the material with other materials. You make notes, you write snippets of text, you layer images on top of one another, you allude to ideas and other works of art through the use of titles. You also allow your students to create or use unexpected genres like advertisements, photographic essays, catalogues, and transcriptions.

For James Kastely in “From Formalism to Inquiry: A Model of Argument in Antigone,” the main focus of the classroom should also be inquiry. Rather than rote forms of academic argumentation which don’t work in the real world anyway, Kastely wants students to theorize argumentation as a political problem that involves “both difference and resistance to difference.” Kastely states, “The theorizing of argument as a site of resistance to difference opens up the possibility of conceiving argument as a particular type of inquiry in which disagreement becomes a resource for exploring both personal and political identity” (223). Kastely accomplishes by using literary texts such as Sophocles’ ancient Greek tragedy Antigone, which he believes dramatizes the problems with argumentation, particularly in the characters of Creon and Antigone. 

For me, Kastely’s piece not only reinforced what I already know and believe about rhetorical argumentation in our complex world but also presents a huge challenge as I am about to design my unit on argumentation for next week. I can tell that students are already itching to outline and defend why they are right and why they cannot possibly be wrong based on the logical evidence they are going to use to support their claims. And if I asked them whether they thought their argument might actually persuade someone to change his or her course of action, this might even seem like a dumb question. Of course it would; it’s the right position, and it’s the one they hold, which must mean it’s the only position that is not foolish. Now, I’m sure some students would be much less certain than this, but as I think about teaching them about logical fallacies and strategies for addressing the naysayer in their texts, I can’t help but think that what I am really teaching them is a completely fake form of argumentation that does not correspond to reality. Argumentation for academic argumentation’s sake. Yet Kastely’s solution is difficult and perhaps even soul-crushing for students (or more soul-crushing than their realization that formal logic doesn’t persuade people). He states, “These works would allow us to teach argument as a philosophical or political problem and not as a mode of presenting evidence for purposes of justifying claims. Instead, they would raise questions as to why arguments  so often fail, and they would open students to questions of why, given the unlikeliness of success, someone might argue” (239). Kastely then offers a nebulous “hope of discovering new understandings” for students who have just realized that the best argument in the entire world will never persuade those who are certain. 

How could a classroom accomplish all this in one semester? The underlying impetus of Kastely’s approach seems incredibly pragmatic, and he obviously believes that using literary texts such as Antigone is a great way to go about it, but how, exactly, do you talk students, some of whom are certain they know what they want out of the composition classroom, into taking a dramatic detour into the murky? This question probably also applies to Sirc. How do you establish a caesura in the composition classroom long enough for every student to get hooked on something? What do you do with students who don’t care about much of anything? What do you do with students who are suspicious of such projects from the start?