composition – MATTHEW OVERSTREET

On Attunement

Attunement. A word I often deploy (e.g., my recent claim that writing instruction involves, at heart, the cultivation of an “ethics of attunement”). Lately though, I’ve come to think that I’ve been using this term somewhat thoughtlessly. In the following I’d like to map out attunement’s various meanings, and in the process, argue for a redefinition that foregrounds attunement as a conscious act.

At the most basic level, attunement implicates sound. A group of individuals is “in tune” when the members of that group vibrate at the same resonance or pitch. Attunement is the act of moving into alignment with the group’s shared frequency. There’s an interesting mix of conscious and unconscious, mental and material elements at play in such a act (which perhaps explains attunement’s recent popularity as a means to describe writing and rhetoric).

Attunement, it seems to me, can be driven by an articulable desire—intent to attune, we might say—or it can be totally outside the realm of conscious control. It can be a rational, step-by-step process of experimentation and adjustment (as when a singer flexes his throat muscles, trying to match a note on a scale) or it can be something that the body seems to do completely on its own (as when we find ourselves becoming nervous around a nervous person). There’s always some bodily or material aspect at play. Attunement can never take place completely in the mind or “on paper.” We’d never say that one formal equation, for example, is in tune with another. Relatedly, attunement implicates the emotional or affective. Within psychology, I am told, attunement indicates how in touch one is with the moods or emotional states of another. To be attuned is to register, and respond, to those states.

So attunement casts a wide net, indicating the ability, either conscious or unconscious, of one entity to adapt (by physically adapting) to another. With its hint of emotional receptivity, and related ability to capture so much beyond the logical, the term has become commonplace in rhetoric and composition. Like “care” or “hospitality,” attunement is almost always used in a positive sense. If we dig a bit deeper though, we realize that attunement is in fact ambiguous, both morally and otherwise. To be able to intuite that your friend is upset, and display sympathy, is attunement, sure. But Hitler, for example, also showed a great degree of attunement in his ability to register the energy of German crowds and replicate that energy in his own bodily movements. So attunement can be for good or ill.

As noted, I have recently written of composition’s ethics of attunement. In that discussion I used attunement to capture composition’s commitment to teaching students how to know what needs to be done in a given rhetorical situation. This process is never totally cerebral: we have to be able to “read” the emotional tenor of an audience, for example. It’s never completely outwardly focused either: we have to constantly monitor both the situation and ourselves, wary of the ways in which our biases and predispositions shape what we see and feel. My original argument was that via this dual focus we can help bring our thinking and action in line with what is demanded by a situation. This ability to attune is ultimately what makes a good writer.

Integrally, attunement, as described above, always involves an act of judgement. I obscured this fact in previous discussions and would like to make it clear now. As commonly used, attunement—because it is so extra-rational—seems to imply that one has no choice in the matter. If the crowd wants a speaker to stroke their anger, this thinking goes, the attuned rhetor is one who provides it. To go against the crowd, to keep breathing regular and heartbeat steady when all around you breaths and beats are racing, represents a lack of attunement, yes? As the term is conventionally used, this seems to be the case.

We don’t want to teach student-writers to be like Hitler (obviously). So how can we understand attunement in a more sophisticated manner? We need a force which checks attunement. What force though? To what is the process of adaptation responsible? The answer, I’d like to suggest, is the ideal. The ideal is the good, that towards which we strive and by which we measure our practice. It is a verbalizable statement (not a feeling or “vibe”) and necessarily abstract. It is actualized via stories which illustrate the application of the ideal in specific contexts. For example, one might say that she is driven by a commitment to “Justice.” She might know stories– specific, context-rich examples– of when justice prevailed and when it did not. Given a situation, it is her responsibility to measure that situation, and compare it to her set of stories. Though this process, she can know how to think and how to act. Should she allow herself to become attuned to the fury of the crowd—to channel and embody that passion—or should she remained detached?

This analysis adds a third element to what I previously defined as the dual motion between self and world. An “ethics of attunement,” we can now say, involves triangulation among self, world and ideal. Unlike pure bodily or emotional attunement, this is by definition a conscious process. It involves thinking. Of course, there are no guarantees here. We must “read” ourselves, the situation and the various ideals implicated, and can never be sure that our reading is right. In this regard, judgement in the face of actual choice imbues every element of an ethics of attunement. As suggested, this articulation marks something of a break with previous definitions of attunement, which focused too heavily (in my opinion) on the unconscious and bodily. It is necessary though, I believe, if we are to understand attunement as a moral act.

Putting the Beatles in Context

Lesson Plans

The centerpiece of my writing class is always the lived experience of the student. I try to stress though that our experience of the world is never disinterested or given. Instead, what we see and hear and feel is always shaped by various forces. Here’s a lesson plan that seeks to illustrate this point.

Note: this is for a 75 minute class.

Lesson Plan:

To begin, I had my students listen to the Beatles’ epic “A Day in the Life,” and do a short (~7 minutes) freewrite describing the experience. My prompt asked them simply, how does this song make you feel? What does it make you think about? Why?

* This activity could utilize any piece of music, as long as 1) the students are not overly familiar with it and 2) it has a substantial entry on Wikipedia. “A Day in The Life” works particularly well, I found, because of its challenging nature and the well-documented (and interesting) circumstances of its composition.

After freewriting, I asked if anyone knew anything about this song (some recognized it was the Beatles, but no one knew its name). I then told them the name, and asked them to go to the relevant Wikipedia page and do some research. “Find out where this song comes from,” I asked. I gave them 15 minutes to read about the song. Though instructed to start with the song’s Wikipedia page, they were encouraged to follow whatever research path grabbed their attention.

We then listened to the song again, and did another freewrite. My prompt this time asked them to note any differences in what they heard or felt or thought. In short, I wanted them to reflect on how background knowledge changed their experience of the song.

Theoretical Justification:

I know from my own experience that learning the context and compositional background of a piece of music (or film or text) inevitably alters how I engage with that work. I was hoping that my students would experience the same effect, and that reflecting on those changes would make them more aware of how knowledge (and context in general) shapes their understanding of the world.

I also feel that engaging deeply with an object (especially a disruptive one like this song), and attempting to share that experience, is a fundamentally beneficial activity for young writers. It forces them to put their subjective experience in symbolic form. It’s also useful for them to see how others make sense of a shared object. This tracks with one of the main goals of my class—to better understand how we see the world, and how this differs from how others see it. Though I didn’t focus on it much, the varying research paths taken could also provide fruitful grounds for discussion.

Analysis:

After our second freewrite, we spent ~45 minutes discussing what we had written. I started off by having some students read their first freewrite aloud. Their responses were varied and fascinating. Some students wrote of being “confused” and “scared” by this “trippy” song, with orchestral parts which reminded them of the score to a horror movie. Others wrote about how some parts (Paul’s verses, in particular) reminded them of childhood. The dominant tendency, after doing some research, was to focus more on the lyrics and the story behind the song (IE, an acquaintance of the Beatles dying in a car wreck). This, predictably, lead to the students hearing an increasingly plaintive element.

Perhaps the most telling response was from a student who wrote about how at first, the unusual structure of the song caused her “anxiety.” This anxiety was relieved once she did some research and “knew what the song was about.” This response says much about this student’s relationship with novelty. It is my hope that after exploring this relationship in the classroom, she’ll be more inclined to take note of it in other contexts.

Conclusion:

This was a fun exercise, and I certainly saw changes in my students’ experience of the song. I’m inclined to believe though that to really facilitate the kind of inter-contextual transfer I’m seeking, it may be necessary to have the students draw some generalizable conclusions from the activity. Towards that end, perhaps this in-class activity could be followed by an essay assignment in which students discuss this “experiment” and what it says about the relationship between knowledge and lived experience.

In group discussion I’d also like to put more emphasis on what the differences noted “mean.” For example, the song’s background story made one student feel less anxious. What does this change say about the importance of narrative coherence in her world? Certainly this question was implicit in our discussion; if I were to teach this activity again though, I’d like to make it explicit.

Diane Davis’ Breaking Up (At) Totality, Leslie Jones & Twitter Trolls

Current Events, Philosophy

Continuing my summer reading, I arrive at Diane Davis’ Breaking Up (at) Totality: A Rhetoric of Laughter. Though I’ve rarely seen it cited, in my opinion, this is a key rhet-comp text. I’d like to give a quick summary, then apply Davis’ ideas to a recent media event— Ghostbusters actor Leslie Jones being chased off Twitter by racist trolls. I find Davis’ work highly descriptive of the current media environment. But does it offer a prescription to help us survive said environment?

For my money, Breaking Up, with its stylistic wordplay and utter rejection of foundations, represents the zenith of postmodern rhet-comp theorizing. Following Derrida, Avital Ronell and Victor Vitanza, Davis argues that language is suffused with what she calls “laughter,” a form of erotic energy. Reason and logic, along with conventional discursive forms, inevitably attempt to clean up this eroticism, to pin down meaning. This project is doomed to failure though. The result is that subjects and social structures (which from Davis’s pomo perspective are an effect of language) remain fluid, unstable. Davis celebrates this sense of fluidity and excess. “To be spoken by a language contorted in laughter,” she writes, “is to be spoken by language on the loose: no/thing is excluded, censored, or negated” (95).

I’m struck by the similarities between the discursive scene Davis describes and that which I encounter everyday on social media. What is the meme economy but the unchecked proliferation of meaning? New forms emerge, and with them new logics, only to immediately be submerged by newer forms and logics. Reason, as embodied in traditional philosophical discourse, has no place here. Same with morality. The old rules—about who can speak, what they can say and how they can say it—simply do not apply. Instead, laughter in its most primal and yes, erotic, manifestation rules the day.

Consider the racist trolls hounding Leslie Jones. Working under the auspices of notorious alt-righter Milo Yiannopoulus, they swamped her Twitter feed with racist insults and forged screenshots suggesting she made homophobic remarks. Here we see language wildly out of control. There’s no demand for “facts” or “objective” referent, no limitations on what meanings can be conjured. Jones is a comedian and actor? Jones is the source of AIDS? Jones believes we need to “gas dese faggots”? Driven by a desire for “lolz”, and unchecked by either formal restrictions (rules regarding spelling and grammar, for example) or social/technological restrictions, meanings proliferate. Language, pulsing with vulgar, grotesque human desire, really is on the loose. No/thing is excluded.

So, in essence, what we have on Twitter is a world where anyone can say anything, think anything—and for many subjects, especially marginalized ones like Ms. Jones, this excess is terribly traumatic. So what should be done? The first impulse for many, as Davis suggests, is to try and limit potential meanings, re-erect some of the barriers postmodernity has torn down. On Twitter, this typically takes the form of appeals to authority (demands that trolls be banned, for example). According to Davis though, all attempts to limit meaning will inevitably fail. Indeed, there seems to be a direct relationship between censorship and erotic power—the more we attempt to restrict certain meanings (the racism of the trolls, for example), the more erotically charged those meanings become. Simply put, the more we protest, the more lolz.

So we can’t restrict meaning. What then? It’s a bit tenuous, but I would suggest that Davis does offer something like a solution. Quoting Victor Vitanza, she suggests an “antibody rhetoric” capable of “enhancing our abilities to tolerate the incommensurabilities” which make up the postmodern condition (102). As I read it, such a rhetoric demands a rejection of foundations, a rejection of even the pretense of objective reference. In short, it means we must come to view language—even terrible, hurtful language– as a laughing matter.

Let’s put this vision to work. In the case of Leslie Jones versus the trolls, we have competing desires—namely, to enjoy Twitter (Jones) and to cause pain in the name of lolz (trolls). These desires are incommensurable. And they fuel meanings which are also incommensurable. Going back to the erotic power of censorship, perhaps the way to drain power from the latter is through a sort of radical acceptance. Jones must come to “tolerate the incommensurabilities,” to laugh with the (admittedly pathetic) desire of the trolls. If she can do so, perhaps the incommensurabilities will be rendered mute. The desire of the trolls, and the accompanying meanings, will fade.

Breaking Up (at) Totality is a radical text, as I believe my attempt to apply it to a real-life situation demonstrates. In short, thinking along with Davis, we come to the conclusion that marginalized, maligned subjects must somehow come to believe that words simply do not matter. This is a hard position to accept. Indeed, word merchants of all stripes want us to believe the opposite. In a world without rules though—which for better or worse is the world of social media—it may be our only option.