Sirc

What I find so incredibly striking about Geoffrey Sirc's "English Composition as a Happening" is the way in which the terms and images that Sirc evokes so effectively conjure up images related to the chora. Sir begins by asking us to re-locate "the idea of the writing classroom as blank canvas, ready to be inscribed as a singular compositoin space" a place that he theorizes would allow its inhabitants "a sense of the sublime, making it a space no one wants to leave, a happening space" (1).

"Happenings were all about blurring tthe boundaries between art and life. They underscored what cage maintained, which was that "what we are doing is living and that we are not moving toward a goal, but are, so to speak, at the goal constantly and changing with it, and that art, if it is going to be anything useful, should open our eyes to this fact" (kirby and schechner, 60) (9).

"To de-determine form and content means that the writing can just be;/.../The happening artists' basic rule was indeterminacy: nothing is previously determined, neither form nor material content; everything is under erasure. The only given, a kind of non-axiom, is the one stated by RAucschenberg, who cared not at all about control or intention, only change: 'What's existing is that we don't know. There is no anticpated rule, but we will be changed'" (10).

Sirc calls his approach both "disruptive/restorative" (12)--choratic no?

I think Sirc's argument works on several levels. For one, he is talking about the rhetoric of the physical space--"Physically the space insists on order and authoritarianism; the enemies of creativity. the teacher as ultimate authority/.../and the students as passive receptacles at his feet" ( 5-6). And of course on the less material level, he is talking about the rhetoric of the theoretical space that pedagogical practice participates and engages.