Am I blog enough

So, in my continuing perusal of two very excellent blogs: Collin vs. Blog  and Culture Cat, I had the unpleasant realization that "real" rhetoric blogs (at least these two) exist within a more exclusive webrealm than does blogger.com. This worries me; will my blog be considered less important, less academic, have less technical merit by virtue of being so easy to acquire and set up? 

I hope not. Until I find out for sure I am going to keep writing. Tonight I finished a book review for 20th Century Rhetoric. I reviewed Baudrillard's Simulacra and Simulation. I just can't get enough of Baudrillard, and his theories are so central to my work. I think I decided on a final project for 20th Century Rhet. It is a subject about which I have wanted to write for a very long time now, and one about which I have written in the past. Using Bill Readings' book The University in Ruins as a primary text, I would like to consider the state of the university now, 14 years after Readings' proclamation that the system of  liberal education is totally bankrupt, our cultural project vacuous and void of meaning. The dereferentialization of all meaning is a central theme for Readings, and I plan to use Simulacra to read Readings' articulation of the University of Excellence, especially "Value's Last Tango," the next to last chapter in Baudrillard's work.

The plight of students who were born to become seasoned and discriminating consumers has long fascinated me. How can they be blamed for treating a university education and its ultimate goal as they would any other product they purchase? We as educators want to menacingly point our fingers at the students, at their parents, and at the community at large and declare that Education will Not be Reduced to a Commodity. But it has already been so reduced!

Thus arises the ideological conflict which exists between students, who see college as a necessary (and very expensive) obstacle which must be tackled and dispersed with before they can continue on their merry way toward upper mobility; and teachers, who became teachers because they value learning and believe in education. We have a major disparity here, one which I am so looking forward to exploring. I plan to use Rebekah Nathan's insightful work My Freshman Year (2005) for the insights Nathan was able to gain in her unorthodox anthropological experiment; Antony Easthope's 1991 reading of Foucault as well as Foucault's own work, Discipline and Punish (1979). Baudrillard is of course indispensable, and I plan to use a chapter from his Selected Writings (2001), "Consumer Society" in addition to Simulacra. I am toying with the idea of interviewing students in an attempt to integrate an interdisciplinary methodology (and also because hey, I really like interviewing people. In my folklore life I bought a fantastic little digital recorder and boy is it neat). Anyway, that is still on the back burner for now because interviews are time consuming all around - meeting, rescheduling, transcribing, interpreting. Usually, the whole process is worth it though. So we shall see. I've also been wanting to read Naomi Wolf's The End of America (2007) for way too long; hopefully it will yield the treasures I've been building it up to have.

So I'm pretty excited. Tomorrow I plan to execute the completion of another paper that I have been working on for *way too long* and to finally get it off my to do list. It has become the To Do item that looms continually at the bottom of the list, Xed out at the end of one week and reprinted at the beginning of the next. But tomorrow, it gets crossed off for the last time.

I also need to busy myself with finishing these conference proposals and my journal abstract. I have decided that for Technoculture, I am going to examine the construction of identity through status updates, and also to consider the surveillance function of the "news feed" and the "friend update" in online communities. I still am unsure about what exactly I want to do for HERA's conference next April, so that needs to be simmering. For Louisiana's Conference on Language and Literature, theorizing the desire to smoke cigarettes and the rhetoric surrounding smoking in general promises to be wildly interesting, especially as I have publicly declared my intention to quit, which is rarely as good an idea as it seems at the time. But alas. The hour groweth late and I shall retire, so as to be fresh tomorrow for some theoretical ass-kicking that is long overdue.