Assembling and Understanding the Self

Consider:

"[Joseph] Harris suggests looking at students as 'at once rock fans and intellectuals, who watch old sitcoms and read criticism, who wear Levis and look skeptically at advertising' (233). He recommends such assignments as asking students to look at the way they use popular texts in forming their own identities and, instead of simply applying an interpretive method, to think about how that method works and what its uses and limits might be" (George and Trimbur 83).

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It seems appropriate that I'm writing this while listening to Copeland (one of my favorite bands) streaming from their Myspace page. And in fact it is Myspace, and the endless quiz-bulletins my Myspace friends post as minute glimpses into the self, that I think of when I read this quotation.

Coke or Pepsi?
Butter or margarine?
Baths or showers?

Or the more open ended:

What's the last think you ate?
What are the last three songs you listened to on your iPod?
Who's the last person you IMed?

(It's funny how these quizzes, and their writers, assume that the self can be neatly slotted into trite binaries like the ones above...but I digress.)

Although I find these quizzes hopelessly silly, I think there is something about their utter popularity that is quite telling. We--not all but many in modern culture--seem to enjoy expressing who we are by aligning ourselves with (or against) particular pieces of pop culture.

Scan any Facebook page and you can see this. Scan MINE--I'm guilty. I've tried to say, this is me! by arranging just the right collection of cultural references.

What is it about how we collect cultural symbols that helps deliminate who we are as human beings?

"Okay, so you like THAT tv show, those bands, those movies, but you don't have a cell phone and you shop at these stores . . . I understand you as X type of person."

Yes, we can debate whether or not WE do this--and by we I mean the older, the wiser, the aware. Those living the examined life in the examined world. But I think that it's still safe to contend that even when when know what we are doing, we do it anyway. We draw linking lines from ourselves to cultural objects (or between us and them, separating ourselves). We just do it with more intention.

What I'm really wondering is this: how can we use this idea to reach our students? Can we use pop culture to show our students that we get them, that we acknowledge there is a complex youth sub-culture eminating out of the complexity?

I have, for the last four or five years, been fascinated by this idea--the idea that if we acknowledge the sub-culture of youth, we open up an entire vein of repressed, tense, complex, volatile, deep, thoughtful, throbbing, consuming artistic energy. Possibility. Teeming rivers that we might, as teachers, help funnel into creative outlets that produce first messy, angsty, self-centered writing and then, through response and revision, later emerge as shaply, authetic text.

Why can't we, even one day of our many class days together, start with the worlds that so enfold our students, helping them see how understanding their pop culture definitions can lead to self-awareness, authetic voice and, later, lasting text?

I'll be thinking about it, even though, I admit, there are aspects of current youth culture I find utterly stupid, confusing and even damaging. But what help does my judgment provide? If I can't get my students to think about it, who cares what I think?

Hmm.

Note: I consider my response on cultural studies to be a sliver--a Myspace-quiz-sized glimpse, if you will--of what we can do with the ideas shared in our text. There are certainly more complex, sophisticated takes on CS to be had. This is simply the one that was most meaningful to me after reading what I can at best call a chaotic article. After whirling and swirling throughout it, this is where I landed.