About a week later, as the scale of suffering in Japan became clearer, I became less concerned with everybody else’s questionable investments in the pain of others and more suspicious of my own hesitancy to engage emotionally.

Although I frowned and cried as solicited upon seeing the unavoidable photos of people staggering through muddy ruins, I wasn’t sure how to feel the rest of the time.  Brian Massumi’s claim that

“power is no longer fundamentally normative, like it was in its disciplinary forms—it’s affective”

suggests that stories and images circulate and infiltrate strategically. Even though, as de Certeau reminds us, readers aren’t fools and we employ tactics with which to play and navigate the web of discourse, we’re still stuck inside of it—and it inside of us.  Our critique of media, savvy avoidance of manipulation, and resistance to being told how to feel are themselves already the threads of discourses that have been woven into us.

Part of me wants to believe that some basic feeling for the suffering of others arises before all of this, that there’s a relational web prior and in excess to the discursive one—and that it’s woven more tightly.

But if the mass mediated means through which we gain access to others is always already shaping how we feel for those others, how can we feel without capitulating to the powers that traffic in affect? In the case of catastrophes, which seem to (fairly regularly) punctuate the passage of ordinary life with significance, how do we resist the meaning-making machines while still engaging meaningfully?

I’ll explore these questions here and in a series of posts to follow by looking into the ways various media structure our experiences of disaster and construe “eventfulness.” Considering the political and social interests at stake in Japan and the US, I’m curious about how this particular disaster is being positioned in historical time, and what such placements obscure, or displace.  But mostly, as I meditate on my own relationship with Japan and reaction to the unfolding news, I wonder how to engage responsibly with media and the “real” event.   Helpful to this project is Diana Taylor’s model of the witness who, reflecting Louis Althusser’s model of dialectic spectatorship and Augusto Boal’s “spect-actor”, serves as a

“guarantor of the link between the I and the you, the inside and the outside”and “accepts the dangers and responsibilities of seeing and of acting on what one has seen.”

This task is not easy considering how often we are bombarded with images and news of disaster.  People tell me that they either feel distant and numb to the repeating images, or else they connect to the images through identification: imagining the people in the images are one’s own mother, brother, etc.  The problem with the latter approach is that it brings the other into one’s own ideological universe and blinds one to the political, cultural, and other factors that structure the experience of the event.

These modes of spectatorship are not unlike those of hegemony and identification criticized by Althusser in relationship to theater.  However, when we are dealing with the theater of the real, and its tendency towards catastrophe, the ideological agendas organizing devastation into spectacle elicit modes of relating, as well as detaching, that register in the body.

Quoting the work of Hal Foster regarding shock and subjectivity in America, anthropologist Allen Feldman points to the double nature of the subject’s pleasure:

“in its guise as witness the mass subject reveals its sadomasochistic aspect, for this subject is split in relation to a disaster; even as he or she may mourn the victims, even identify with them masochistically, he or she may also be thrilled sadistically by the victims of whom he or she is not one.”

Feldman raises the stakes when he explicitly links the creation of the “mass subject” in modernity to catastrophe and the visual technologies through which the catastrophic is ideologically produced and distributed.  Developing a theory of the “actuarial gaze,” which he describes as

“the visual organization and institutionalization of threat perception and prophylaxis,” Feldman asserts that “the visual culture of risk reportage circulates catastrophic images as a psychosocial and, ultimately, political desire and currency.”

The visceral intensities ignited and snuffed in these visual images constitute the subjectivity from which we establish ourselves as a public, and how we, as a public, are going to relate or not.

I’d like to say that my reluctance to participate in the disaster drama stemmed solely from a refusal to let this awful thing give me any sort pleasure, masochistic or otherwise.  Or that I harbored sophisticated political suspicions of risk reportage.

But I was primarily loathe to identify with the community of spectators I imagined excitedly rallying their concern on the receiving end of the mediated image.  It was the thrill of the social—the heightened sense of occasion—that I couldn’t stand.  Nothing, it seemed, would make me feel so far away, so alienated from the thing in itself than positioning myself from this A-frame cottage in Iowa somewhere inside the Big Deal Event.  As for approaching the thing in itself, I knew of no other means than those used by the community of spectators themselves: disaster footage.  But did I really want to go there?  As elaborated by Zizek, the “passion for penetrating the Real Thing” spirals into an increasingly violent pursuit of the Real within the images that structure our reality.  I did not want to experience the tsunami as the “thrill of the Real,” the ultimate special effect.

An internet search brought me to a video of the tsunami swallowing the coastal town of Kuji where I had stayed with a family nearly 10 years ago.   The dreadful thrill of the footage did indeed flood my body darkly, excessively, like the tsunami itself.  Feeling my own footing give way, despite sitting down, I braced myself.  Had someone been next to me, however, I would have reached out to them, without thinking, to steady myself.

I wonder now about that instinct.  Why, when something awful or awesome is about to happen, or has just happened, do we tend to grab on to the people next to us?  Surely, the support sought by such a gesture isn’t merely that of balance, but of affiliation.   I hadn’t wanted to get on the drama bandwagon, but here I was: wanting to connect.

The public I imagined gaping from a safe distance was probably not the public into which my friend had been calling me when she sent me that facebook message.   Rather than use the event to elevate the drama in our lives, she may have been reaching out to me in order to ground the drama in a shared reality. This is not to say she was trying to reduce the significance of the event; the ordinary world has its own sort of eventfulness.  As Kathleen Stewart describes it,

“modes of attending to scenes and events spawn socialities, identities, dream worlds, bodily states and public feelings of all kinds.”

The everyday eventfulness “resonating in bodies, scenes, and forms of sociality,” spreads in whispers and flourishes in indeterminacy.  Something is happening, is going to happen, to us.  The mode is one of suspension that fastens potential significance onto the tiniest of things.  The effect isn’t of elevating reality into ungraspable proportions, but of charging reality with limitless points of connection.

While the looming risk perception propagated in the “actuarial gaze” may make and mask the ways in which we always feel vulnerable to invisible, ever-present and threatening powers, maybe it fails to displace the ways we feel vulnerable to each other.   The witness, unlike the spectator, creates a zone of proximity in the “link between the I and the you”.   Amidst the spectacular scenes of ruin, my old friend took the risk of writing me after all this time, took the risk of hearing bad news and having to respond, and took the risk of being criticized or blogged about.  In doing so she offered me the first clue for thinking about mediated models for responsible action.

OK, maybe it’s not that exciting. What’s really happening is that professors and teachers are getting fed up with the limitations and corporate-overlordness of commercial learning software like Blackboard and WebCampus — and in a web 2.0 world, there are plenty of options for the fed up. With a click of the mouse and a sweep of the browser, it’s easy as Pi to cobble together your own online learning system — one with far more to offer both students and faculty than the tools schools are laying out big bucks for.

The Chronicle brought the… movement? news? thingy? … to mainstream attention, but their contribution is just a fillip on the work of professors and teachers all over the nation who have been thinking long and hard about how to bring learning to the web — and in doing so, to their students.

Let me say right here, for the record, I don’t buy all this “digital generation” nonsense. We’ve got a way to go before that happens. When I no longer have to teach my students how to Google unfamiliar terms or how to add an attachment to an email, then I might well believe that they are comfortably native in the online world; for now, the most I can say is that what I see as an important set of tools, they seem to see as a big box of toys, toys they’re happy to play with as long as it’s the same toy everyone else has.

But that doesn’t mean the Internet isn’t important — in fact, I think it makes it more incumbent on us, as educators, to show the amazing power of the Internet for more than just gossiping about your friends and breaking up with your lovers.

So What IS It?!

OK, edupunk. Basically, what you’ve got is a nascent movement by educators inspired by the DIY-ness of punk music (and fashion, design, writing, etc.) to step outside the walled garden provided by their institutions. Some are turning to wikis, others to blogging, still others to user-generated content, Google maps, and all manner of mashups. The occasionally savage Michael Wesch is a good example, though I don’t know if he considers himself “edupunk” — but it’s nt particularly punk to worry about labels, so who cares?

Edupunk is also a political statement. Scratch that — it’s a collection of political statements, and sometimes isn’t a political statement at all. Stephen Downes sums it up nicely:

Edupunk, it seems, takes old-school Progressive educational tactics–hands-on learning that starts with the learner’s interests–and makes them relevant to today’s digital age, sometimes by forgoing digital technologies entirely.

My own entry into edupunk (though I didn’t think of it as such at the time, and if you don’t count Savage Minds, which seems animated by the same principles even if it’s not explicitly an instructional tool) came about last summer when I decided to implement blogging in my “Gender, Race, and Class” course. For years, I’d been requiring a weekly response paper, an ungraded assignment that asked students to record their thoughts on the readings. This has been by far my most successful assignment — I could easily forego tests and essays, if not for the fact that a class of ungraded assignments probably wouldn’t give much incentive to master the material. But it galled me that the conversation these papers represented was just between each individual student and myself. I wanted their fellow students to benefit from their wide range of experience, thinking, and opinion.

So what’s a professor to do? As any patient IT department employee will tell you, “WebCampus (or Blackboard) offers a variety of interactive features including bulletin boards to facilitate virtual conversations in the blah blah blah. ” I’m sure they offer a really swell product, but a) the commercial classroom management systems offer a standard that students will never use again after their graduation, and b) they exist behind the university’s paywall. If my students have something to say, they might as well be saying it to the world, not just to the students in their class whose registration bill is current.

As far as I’m concerned, teaching students to engage with the world around them is crucial, both morally and pedagogically. (And, you’ll say, “politically”. So be it.) WebCampus and Blackboard don’t offer that; they offer a way to standardize education and, by extension, students.

So I built a blog. On Drupal, if you must know. And I required students to post their responses for the world to see, and to comment on each other’s posts. That second requirement is, of course, my hat-tip to totalitarianist authority; I knew that organic conversation was unlikely to develop — because they’re not “digital natives”!

That summer session went great, and the blog played a big role in that. In the fall, I tried again, this time with two classes, one blog. It didn’t work as well. I couldn’t stay on top of it, posts got shorter and shorter and less and less thoughtful, interaction was forced, there were too many students talking at once. I’ll need to rethink it before I try again — but it was definitely worth the effort.

What’s the point?

A lot of professors are fed up. They’re fed up with the commodification of education, they’re fed up with being straight-jacketed in their teaching because the school paid good money for an expensive system and they’d damn well better use it, they’re fed up by the increasing emphasis on education as workplace training instead of citizen (or even human) training, and they’re fed up with the apparent inability of administrators to do anything with a positive educational effect.

And, frankly, we’re fed up with failing. No matter what grade you teach, whether that’s 3rd grade or upper-division uni, you’re getting classes, semester after semester, that are unprepared for grade-appropriate education. It’s a tough thing to decide how many of your students you’re never going to reach; a lot of us will try anything in the hopes that we can reduce that number to zero. Blogging, twittering, mashing up data, wiki-ing, and other web-enabled activities allow us to offer the kind of hands-on work that we know can have an effect — much more, anyway, than assigning a multiple-choice quiz through Blackboard!

I’m only skimming the surface here. bavatuesdays is doing a good job of keeping up to date on edupunk’s emergence (the link is to all posts tagged “edupunk”; pay special attention to The Glass Bees); a new Wikipedia entry will likely evolve as more is known about this newly discovered “tribe” of educators; and Leslie Madsen-Brooks offers a good overview of the meanings attached to “edupunk” so far at Blogher.