Well, OK. It was actually called “New Perspectives on Class.” But if you’ve got that nostalgie de la boue, friend, that hunger for naughty words in academic contexts, you likely know that I’m disinclined to disappoint: read on.
I was happy to meet Jen Beech at this year’s Cs, and happy — however briefly — to meet Julie Lindquist, as well, both of whom were present at the “New Perspectives on Class” panel. Amy Robillard, whose recent CE piece on affect and student scholarship I totally admire, presented on “Humility, Immediacy, Necessity: Bourdieu and the Production of Authenticity in Working Class Narratives”: if you know my work and how close I’m getting to the end of the diss, and the prominent place affect and authenticity take in my chapters 2 and 5, you know I wasn’t going to miss her talk.
Plus she said “bullshit” 45 times. In a totally scholarly, deadpan, and rigorous way.
To start, she began by describing how she “asks students to compose two to three pages of bullshit on vague topics like fear or patriotism,” because plagiarism and bullshit both spring from a failure to prepare. (Moment of obnoxious vanity: what would Amy make of my plagiarism sequence?) Robillard cited Lindquist’s description of the “what if?” characteristics of academic discourse (and one of Lindquist’s working-class Smokehouse respondents, “Walter,” who declared “Bullshit on ‘What if!'”) in order to propose that writing teachers might do well to play up the connections between “what if” and bullshit. In characterizing some forms of discourse that he used as “bullshit,” Walter disowned his own rhetorical labor by devaluing it, and in so doing strategically held on to the working-class identity he privileged, by proposing that his affectual and authentic working-class rhetorical strategies were inherently more valuable that the “bullshit” that — to some — exists as rhetoric for its own sake; word-wanking without referent or valuation.
Tangent: this spun me a bit, because I’ve been lately looking at word-work done for its own sake and its use value in the writing classroom as that which might be privileged for the way it forestalls the evacuation of use value in favor of exchange value predicated on the future commodified instrumentality of writing skills — but I get where Amy’s coming from. Still, I’m always suspicious of two-category oppositions, so I wonder: what might Amy make of Shadi Bartsch’s “doublespeak” (Actors in the Audience) from Roman times, sort of the counterhegemonic twin of Leo Strauss’s ugly esoteric discourse, in which rhetors craft messages that carry different meanings to different parties based upon their positions of privilege? (This is different from irony, which can be read multiple ways by everyone: in some ways, it’s very much about class position.) Is there a possible continuum between bullshit and not-bullshit? How does it work?
Do working-class students see the labor of academics as bullshit? Well, let’s define bullshit: Amy uses Harry Frankfurt’s book to fine effect, particularly its definition of bullshit as carrying “a negative relation to the truth.” Liars care about their relationship to the truth; bullshitters don’t. So bullshit is blatant and overbearing, and avoids the equivocation of falsehood in its highly context- and audience-dependent rhetorical nature. Bullshit doesn’t even worry about the truth: it just does its rhetorical thing.
Robillard then moved to Bourdieu’s famous and ubiquitously quoted observation from Distinction that “Taste classifies, and classifies the classifier,” and Bourdieu’s concern with the “distance from necessity” and the way in which “the aesthetic disposition” brackets off material and practical and real-world concerns. The aesthetic disposition equals doing something for its own sake, disconnecting it from material and worldly concerns: in language, it’s word-wanking without referent or valuation. Academics like to argue, and they often do so for the sake of performance, rather than for the sake of utility or instrumentality. Given that circumstance, working-class students may see the conventions of academic discourse as lending themselves to a rhetoric that serves only itself while offering zero effect on their material lives: in short, they may see it as bullshit. We need, Robillard argued, a deeper engagement in cross-class conversations about what academic and non-academic argument does.
Thanks, Mike, for making my talk sound so damn smart. You’re quite the excellent summarizer. I’m glad you saw the “bullshit” as deadpan and academic; if only I’d been able to use the term “word-wanking” as nicely as you do here. I’m gonna practice it.
Shit, wish I would have caught the session.
Hum. I don’t think one needs to be (or claim to be) working-class to consider some academic rhetoric bullshit. There’s definitely a relationship, there — I’m just not sure it fractures along class lines.
But hell, we all know I’m disillusioned from ‘way back. 🙂
And people wonder why there are no more English majors…..
Well, I’ll bite, Alan: why are there no more English majors? It sounds like you’re trying to say something about the content or quality of Amy’s presentation, but unfortunately, your comment is rather vague.
Someone indeed might look at the Chronicle and note that English majors comprised 53,162 bachelors degrees out of a total of 1,291,900 — or roughly 4.1 percent. Is that “no more English majors”? Perhaps compared to the 21.9 percent who major in Business and Marketing — but is Engineering in crisis, as well, with only 4.6 percent of total baccalaureate degrees? Computers and Information Sciences, with only 3.6 percent? Mathematics and Architecture, both with less than 1 percent?
And what is the cause-effect relationship you’re pointing out? Does something about my account of Robillard’s presentation suggest some sort of crisis to you? And here I was under the impression that the 400 percent ramp-up in the overproduction of English PhDs through the 1960s and 1970s, and the subsequent job market bust to the point today where we’ve got a 46 percent job placement rate for PhDs in the field, was our significant logistical problem.
But apparently you’d locate what you seem to think is some sort of crisis in the nature of Robillard’s presentation. Can you be more explicit?
Here’s the deal straight up: the way we are taught to teach “writing†is an empty box slathered with bullshit. Want proof? Read almost any book on “Composition and Rhetoric.†You will be drilled with the dullest dictum on the most monolithically mundane minutiae in the universe. It’s bad enough that these yaks are “teaching writing.†What’s worse is that they think they can do it.
And dig this: they hate Literature. It’s no big secret that there’s a great divide in the “English†department between those who teach “composition†and those who teach Literature. We Comp grunts are the poor handmaidens, doing (what Robert Scholes calls) the “shitwork†of the English department. Hardly any Comp “experts†will admit in their tedious tomes that they hate Literature. Only in the hallway.
No, they like the stand-up “journalism†style of writing… the inverted triangle… piss on a page. Lead your brainless reader by the nose; give them “objective facts.†Writers in the “scientific†disciplines blow these hacks in the weeds. Hacks still don’t get it. “Content†means nothing. Packaging is everything. In a sense they are right. If you look at the horseshit that passes for “public discourse,†you might almost believe them.
Please don’t. In our obsession with “audience,†we are teaching “spin.†“Spin†is not writing. It’s bullshit. So if you cover bullshit with chocolate, you can get your “audience†to eat it? Only if your “audience†is terminally stupid, this is the bedrock assumption of contemporary “rhetoric.†Literature attempts to tell the Truth by probing (as Melville said) at the “axis of reality.†How “vague†is that?
But “guiding your reader†through such heavy thoughts as “smoking on campus†or “college sports†prepares one for pursuit of excellence or some such pabulum.
ALL are punished!
Let me see if I can sum up:
The overwhelming majority of monographs in composition are worthless, everybody who teaches composition hates literature, compositionists teach the journalistic inverted triangle format, and contemporary rhetoric has a misguided preoccupation with audience that leads to an inability or refusal to perceive and communicate Truths.
Have I got it right?
If so, I must say you’ve clearly and admirably embodied your own credo in your adamant opposition to engaging an audience. Good luck with those Truths.
Uh-oh, I’m going to have stop enjoying Melville’s Typee, which happens to be my literature read right now. And now I don’t get to enjoy teaching that early American Lit either, dang! Guess I’m not a true compositionist. 🙂
Hey! I got a bite!
“Overwhelming majority?†“Everybody?†Nope. But, “…contemporary rhetoric has a misguided preoccupation with audience that leads to an inability or refusal to perceive and communicate Truths.†Exactly correct!
Why is “audience preoccupation†misguided? The writers know it’s bullshit. There IS no “audience†except whoever is grading their paper… and whatever the grader’s perception of this hypothetical “audience’s†hypothetical perception is.
Writers should first engage the Truth. Melville’s Typee is an excellent example, as he was chided for not repeating Typee’s “audience-beloved†formula with Moby-Dick. Hurston is another example, flamed for writing in “dialect.â€
While “moving from writer-based to reader-based prose†is grounded in good intentions, it is a pale shadow of the “customer-focused†philosophy of the corporate world, which is a poor mimicry of Deming’s dance.
In the corporate world, “quality†of the product has morphed into “creating shareholder value,†another bucket of bullshit that actually means “get the stock numbers to go up†with whatever fictional accounting is necessary.
It’s a good sign that “bullshit†has entered into the lexicon of the multiple Cs. “For in this world of lies,†said Melville, “Truth is forced to fly like a scared white doe in the woodlands; and only by cunning glimpses will she reveal herself, as in Shakespeare and other masters of the great Art of Telling the Truth,–even though it be covertly, and by snatches.â€
The liar makes false claims. The bullshitter cares nothing about truth or falsity, only for impressing the audience; and, as Frankfurt has said, “By virtue of this, bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are.†Writing is part of the great “Art of Telling the Truth,†joined Janus-like with the art of Reading.
We could dissect Douglas’ “rhetorical technique,†masticate his metaphor, and miss the point: “Those who profess to favor freedom, and deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightning.â€
This is just a humble attempt at end-of-the-sem agitation for Truth Telling among the “paperwork pedagogy.â€
Hmmm… so much time and no answer. Still contorting to the great lie of “audience-based prose?” And “those Truths,” boyo, not such an easy thing to answer, eh? Aye, but they (“those Truths”) are.
When will we cut through the Gordian Knot of spin-based bullshit and admit that US culture is based on a lie of unending growth? When will we teach our charges the wisdom to confront “those Truths?”
And yes, Language and Rhetoric… in the Classical and Traditional sense… are indeed capable of slicing the knot. “Audience-based prose” is a Lamarckian lie.
Didn’t Aristotle show us the failure of “packaging” with his delicious “cup-o-soup?” He believed it. He practiced it. He died for it. But when the gap between “Truth” and “packaging” becomes so great, the Philosopher must die or join the torchlght parade.
Do we choose to be an Aristotle or a Wittgenstein?