Clinton - Surrealist Games and Knowledge Problems

 

Clinton, Alan Ramón. “Writing is Against Discipline: Three Courses.” Writing Against the

Curriculum: Anti-Disciplinarity in the Writing and Cultural Studies Classroom. Ed. Randi

Gray Kristensen and Ryan Claycomb. Lexington Books: Lanham, Maryland. 2010. Print.

The basic guiding principle of Clinton’s classes is that it is impossible to teach to the composition classroom’s range of majors and disciplines. The argument he makes to his class on the first day is that writing their way out of their disciplines is valuable because this is how one moves beyond repetition to the creation of knowledge. Students write not about topics, but about a “knowledge problem” of interest to them in their fields (this can be as simple as an unanswered question), and they approach this problem using the metaphors and an essential text of another discipline. Students are thus “encouraged to dip into a text that looks interesting to them and make what they can of it, to collide with it (montage) or rip an idea from its original context (collage)” (Clinton 77). Some of the questions asked in this paper assignment are, “how would [this] discipline approach your problem or, for that matter, ‘change the subject’? ” (Clinton 76). Much of Clinton’s preparation for this assignment involves using Surrealist games. His motivation here is that innovation is very often the result of playfulness. Accordingly, Clinton provides us with his adaptations of three of Alastair Brotchie’s Surrealist games: “to what are mutual attractions due?,” “Analogy Cards,” and “One into Another.”

While Clinton uses these games in his Advanced Writing in the Arts and Sciences course, I wonder if a similarly playful approach might be productive in a composition classroom. One of the primary frustrations I have toward the student body I interact with is their (seemingly) collective apathy. Although the exceptions are delightful, overall it is difficult for me to adopt a compassionate stance toward boredom. Perhaps a mindfully-incorporated surrealist game could be used in my class as a way of beginning to bust open assumptions and prejudices—the students’ and the texts’. I am thinking in these terms partly because many of my students don’t yet have majors, and are not very familiar with the research and inquiry norms of fields they have only just chosen. Ultimately, I’m interested in scaling down Clinton’s frame: e.g. instead of requiring students to identify and tackle a knowledge problem from within their own fields (which they may or may not have even chosen), perhaps the notion of a knowledge problem could be brought to bear on an individual reading. My idea here is that the basic conceptual relationship to things encountered in the world has the potential to translate into a critical and inventive stance in other areas as well.