The new College English came in the mail today, and over lunch at campus, I took a quick turn through Dean Rader’s review article, “Composition, Visual Culture, and the Problems of Class.” My first reaction — which likely indicates that I need to go back and do a more careful reading — was that it made me a little grumpy. While I entirely agree that it’s “essential to see all manner of texts as valid objects of inquiry” (650), I’d assert — on a first, quick read — that “the connections” Rader perceives “among rhetoric, visual culture, and social and economic class” (650) are problematic. The two authors that Rader cites who write about “the Problem of Class” are Lynn Bloom and Fredric Jameson — and in the field of composition, that’s distressingly scant, particularly given the poorly researched and self-indulgent class bigotry of the Bloom essay that Rader describes as “thoroughly enjoyable” (640). Such lack of depth leads to the review essay’s more grave difficulty: its not-very-implicit equation (640) of the middle class with textual rhetoric and the working class with visual rhetoric, and subsequent contention (641) that arguments which “privilege the visual over the rhetorical” (do we assume that he here meant “textual” for “rhetorical”?) (641) have a particular class orientation.
There’s also the often-repeated ceci tuera cela argument I’ve griped about before: “visual culture is beginning to supplant print culture” (640). Is there too much culture in the world’s (apparently limited) cultural space? If we see an increase in the traffic of images, do we need to spin open the valves and bleed off some textuality in order to keep the culture pressure from going to condition red? Because most statistics seem to indicate a fairly consistent increase in global literacy.
Finally, there’s the piece’s pedagogical notion — well critiqued by John Walter — that we should teach students this stuff because they’re already skilled at it, because it’s easier for them to do, and because they like it better (638). This is a poor rationale upon which to structure one’s teaching. I’ll reiterate: yes, I wholeheartedly agree on the importance of bringing the composition and analysis of texts in various media and genres into the classroom. But the argument for that importance is one I’m not sure Dean Rader’s review article manages — on the basis of class — to make.
Still, as I said, this is a reaction based upon a first reading, and I hope I might yet be corrected. Clearly, I haven’t here done any close work with the body of Rader’s analysis; it’s simply, rather, that his assumptions about class give me pause, particularly when taken in conjunction with the (already, as he notes, strong) literature in composition on visual rhetoric. Right now, it’s back to Bourdieu, but I know I’ll likely need a break from Pierre at some point soon, so I hope to return to this article.
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