Thursday, January 27, 2005

subject, space, and specificity

I feel soooo tired right now--still recovering from yesterday, and I must leave for campus shortly, but I just want to try to force myself to flesh out some ideas (which I probably won't be able to, but...).

In John Schilb's essay "Cultural Studies, Postmodernism, and Composition" he writes that theorists in both cultural studies and postmodernism stress that "discourse operates i particular conjunctures: in other words, that specific discourses specifically affect specific people at specific times in specific places." I know that this idea alone could be debated, but for the purposes of my cultural studies project, I want to attempt to fill in the "specifics" w/ regard to composition in order to better see what specifics I still need to explore: The specific discourse is academic discourse (or I might get even more specific and say the academic discourse as found in the community of a writing classroom--or something to that effect). The specific people are the students in the time and place of a corporate university setting.

"In criticizing Jameson, Spivak calls for attempts to "specify the postmodern space-specific subject production." Is my project my attempt at doing this I wonder.... The writing classroom housed within the contemporary university producing student subjects.

Many days I just want to avoid dealing with all the PoMo arguments. I mean if NOBODY even knows what it is/what it means, how can little old me deal with it?

And yesterday things just got worse after talking with Mark about this death of the subject, which I know nothing about. If the subject is dead, then who or what am I dealing with in this writing classroom?

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