Geoffrey Sirc

At the height of the expressivist revolution in composition studies circa 1968, much carryover existed between composition studies and popular music, as the Beatles were at the height of their crossover from pop dreamboats to cultural forces of nature, but instead of evolving along with popular musical innovations, composition studies instead failed to embrace the punk aesthetic that emerged in popular music at the end of the 1970s. A return to mistrust of popular, non-academic media, then, returned composition studies to dealing with interdisciplinary academic writing, preferring the rawness of the popular only as it transitioned to a tempered and well-wrought academic-type piece of writing (13).

Composition has always looked at itself as helping students to reform their imperfections, but punk, as a pedagogy, focuses only on the process and play of becoming by reflecting the crap that falls through the cracks and remolding it into a useful something. Punk pedagogy deals with ruptures in the status quo as opposed to the seeming linear unfolding of academia (Duchamp, Macrorie, Rotten). Punk (turning nothing into something) made a stark juxtaposition with the academy (often turning something into nothing). Punk is expected to have a productive-destructive element, destroying what is flavorless and uninteresting in favor of better junk, while leaving what is already interesting intact. Punk as pedagogy is fun, do-it-yourself, in favor of succes on one’s terms over conventional success, and prizes writing to hate and reject writing, negation to bring about the new.

The ultimate punk pedagogy is self-negation, negating the self so some other exterior motherfucker (or system) can’t do it first, which is also an affirmation. This is the Quentin paper in the Bartholomae class, writing-as-tattooed-face: “I don’t care. I don’t care. about man and good and evil I don’t care about this shit fuck this shit, trash and should be put in the trash can with this shit / Thank you very much / I lose again” (26).

The Pedagogy of the Tattooed Face: Negation as Affirmation.