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UC Riverside UC Riverside Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title Perception / Poïesis: Neosophist Pedagogy for a Neoliberal Age of Technoscience Empire Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/5qk3c948 Author Mendoza, Rubén Publication Date 2017 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA RIVERSIDE Perception / Poïesis: Neosophist Pedagogy for a Neoliberal Age of Technoscience Empire A Dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English by Rubén Mendoza June 2017 Dissertation Committee: Dr. Vorris Nunley, Chairperson Dr. Alessandro Fornazzari Dr. Sherryl Vint Copyright by Rubén Mendoza 2017 The Dissertation of Rubén Mendoza is approved: Committee Chairperson University of California, Riverside ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The constitutive model of rhetorical effectivity argues that the self and all of its productions and actions are relational, social endeavors that emerge as generated effects only through collaborative work. This dissertation has been possible only with the generous help, support, and love, of numerous individuals and communities throughout a long, difficult process of learning and becoming. I first thank David R. Willingham and Dr. Sherryl Vint for permission to include portions of Chapter Six, originally published in Paradoxa journal. Financial support was provided by the University of California, Riverside, through the Eugene Cota-Robles Fellowship Award and the Graduate Research Mentorship Programs Fellowship Award, and by California State University through the California State University Chancellor’s Doctoral Incentive Program. I wish to express deep appreciation to my committee chair, Dr. Vorris Nunley, for taking seriously from even before the very beginning my rhetorical, pedagogical, and metaphysical lines of inquiry into art, aesthetics, affect, and the body. His skill as both a rhetorician and a rhetor facilitated my acquisition of the language and rhetorical technê necessary to push beyond (institutional) meaning, as I attempted to oscillate delicately and precariously between orthodox academic discourse and heretical productions of presence. iv I thank my dissertation committee members, Dr. Alessandro Fornazzari and Dr. Sherryl Vint, for their guidance and support throughout the doctoral process. Their attentive feedback and mentorship helped me immensely in attempting to connect the disparate allegory-mode dots of multiple forms of “speculative” fictions and antilogic juxtapositions—hemispheric, historical, hermeneutical. I also wish to thank Dr. Rob Latham and Dr. Freya Schiwy for their guidance and help while serving as members of my doctoral examination committee. In addition, I thank Dr. Rick Mitchell of California State University, Northridge, for his dedicated mentorship and training in the aesthetic rhetoric of ventriloquism from Northridge to Puerto Rico to Panamá, and all points in between. I also thank Dr. Richard T. Rodriguez of the University of California, Riverside, for his unfailing support, understanding, and compassionate guidance in my navigations between and across disparate realms over nearly two decades of ongoing transformation and oscillation. Much gratitude goes as well to Eddie Flores, Chair of Chicana/o Studies at East Los Angeles College, for bringing me back from the dead by believing in me enough to bring me back on board the ELAC team. I thank my family for their love and support throughout my entire educational process, in both institutional structures and other forums of pedagogy. This dissertation culminates a period of precisely forty years of institutional education conditioning since I rode the bus by myself in September 1977 to attend my first day of school in a public kindergarten classroom at Bachrodt Elementary School on Sonora Avenue in pre–Silicon Valley San José, California. But my education begins even before that, in the early 1970s v at the dawn of the neoliberal age, with my mother Bonnie Wray’s trips to the public library as a teen with her three young children, and with her embodied aesthetic- rhetorical practice of reading with us on the living room couch to try to open as best she could other alternative futures and possibilities in the face of the daunting sociopolitical, sociocultural, and socioeconomic limitations and challenges confronting us. I also must give highest thanks and honor to Harry Gamboa, Jr., for his keen, demanding sophistic mentorship and pedagogy through nearly two decades of giddy angst and dizzy pranks, and for the incessant string of pharmaka thrown my way. Finally, my deepest gratitude, respect, and love, to my partner in crime and rhyme and all the contradiction and flux of the dystopian sublime, Joelle Estelle Mendoza, for her love and support, her phronesis politics, and her mētis and kairos and antilogikoi rapport. vi ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Perception / Poïesis: Neosophist Pedagogy for a Neoliberal Age of Technoscience Empire by Rubén Mendoza Doctor of Philosophy, Graduate Program in English University of California, Riverside, June 2017 Dr. Vorris Nunley, Chairperson This dissertation focuses on development of sophistic rhetoric methodology and application of this methodology toward cultivation of arts-based, bodily focused critical pedagogy that can intervene in neoliberal rationalities and subjectivities. The teaching outlined in this dissertation facilitates development of critical-imaginative modes through the figure of the artist-educator. It potentially can disrupt static experiences of self by facilitating student engagement with processural modes of becoming. At the same time, it can open alternatives to neoliberalism’s speculative instrumentalization of future with a creative, non–market based future orientation of critical imagination and practice. In response to neoliberal pedagogy and rhetoric, I forward a neosophist pedagogy that applies the rhetoric and pedagogy of the ancient Sophists to developing critical pedagogy. A core concept of this pedagogy is the pharmakon as critical heuristic toward a techné art-of-living set of practical skills centered on bodily oriented, aesthetics-based phronesis, kairos, and mētis intelligences. Working from a sophistic methodology that vii conceptualizes cognition and meaning as bodily based and collaborative, this dissertation asks: How can we use habituated and conditioned perceptual, linguistic, and bodily orientations against themselves, in order to disorient and then re-orient sensorium, perceptual, and attention apparatuses, to prime the body for different modes of perception and thus different ways of thinking and being/becoming? In addressing this question, I draw on theorists in rhetoric studies, including Susan Jarratt, Richard Enos, and Sharon Crowley; theorists of affect, perception, and mind-body cognition, including Alva Nöe, Bernard Stiegler, Brian Massumi, and Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht; and, critical pedagogues including L.S. Vygotsky, Paolo Freire, and Augusto Boal. This dynamic lens of rhetoric methodology is applied to outlining pedagogy that can effectively respond to neoliberalism understood as a multimodal, transdisciplinary project of rhetoric and public pedagogy. I draw from a diverse field of aesthetic and theoretical approaches. The diversity and scope of this lens is reflected in the areas of aesthetics examined in my case studies, which demonstrate how these areas are especially relevant to countering neoliberalism. These areas include: The contemporary Chican@ art of Harry Gamboa, Jr.; Post-1968 Latin American Narratives of Neoliberalism; and Post-World War II Science Fiction. viii TABLE OF CONTENTS Perception / Poïesis: Neosophist Pedagogy for a Neoliberal Age of Technoscience Empire CHAPTER ONE INTRODUCTION 1 CHAPTER TWO NEOLIBERALISM, RHETORIC, AND THE TASK OF REFASHIONING CRITICAL PEDAGOGY 37 CHAPTER THREE “OUT OF THIS MISH-MASH OF EXPERIENCES”: NOMOS, NIHILISM, AND NEOSOPHIST PEDAGOGY FOR A NEOLIBERAL AGE 71 CHAPTER FOUR EXILE IN CHICANOVILLE : PERFORMANCE, DIGITAL MEDIA, AND THE SOPHISTIC DECOLONIAL TECHNOLOGIES OF HARRY GAMBOA, JR.’S URBAN POETIX 105 CHAPTER FIVE ALLEGORY MODE AND ATURDIMIENTO: THE UNTIMELY POETICS OF PHARMAKON PERFORMANCE IN DICTATORSHIP AND POSTDICTATORSHIP NARRATIVES OF CHILE AND ARGENTINA 183 CHAPTER SIX SCIENCE-FICTIONAL TEACHING: SF AUTHORS, CRITICAL PEDAGOGY, AND THE AESTHETIC RHETORIC OF THE ANCIENT SOPHISTS 256 CHAPTER SEVEN CONCLUSION 327 END NOTES 369 BIBLIOGRAPHY 394 ix CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION At a recent academic conference, I observed a panel of community college instructors discuss a student-initiated Freiran program with which they assisted. The program integrated academic curricula with community social justice work and functioned as a support bridge to meet the academic needs of a diverse group of mostly underrepresented students (many undocumented). On the surface, the program demonstrated a critical pedagogy committed to social justice. But as the presenters provided details, I noticed problems with how issues like migrant labor were framed by a corporate-mediated, multiculturalist ethos of cultural tourism and consumerism. For example, students took a bus trip to nearby fields to “experience” migrant farmworker life on a tour that included a meal prepared by a farmworker family and served to students in the family’s home—for a $40 fee from each student. Discussing the variety of languages spoken by students at the college, presenters