That pretty much does it for my notes on this year’s 4Cs. I got to meet a lot of new people, see some old friends and colleagues, and attend some excellent presentations, most of which I’ve shared my notes on here. I got to hang out with Jen Beech at the Newcomer’s Station, and (very briefly — I had to run to set up my presentation) introduced myself to Julie Lindquist. Plus, after Mark Bauerlein’s sniping, the estimable John Schilb called him “lazy and paranoid” — my goodness!
I finally managed to sync up an audio reading of my presentation with the slides, so if you’re interested, check it out. (Eighteen minutes and thirty seconds of a 28.6 MB .mp4; right-click to download: I added some stuff and tried to read a little more slowly.) It’s a big file, and some of the slides are hard to read at 320 x 240, and my reading comes across as kinda stilted — I didn’t have the presence of mind to actually record while I was presenting, so it felt weird just reading it aloud a second time in my kitchen. Still, for a first attempt at a podcast, I guess it came out OK. Text of the presentation follows after the break.
Temporal Horizons of Value: Understanding the Personal as Political, Social, and Economic
The term “personal writing” has a long, privileged and contested history in composition. Recently, the explosion in the popularity of weblogs and their concern with the personal has given new currency to composition’s consideration of personal writing as social, political, and — in fact — economic act. Personal writing can transform subjective experience into useful student work that goes far beyond the solipsistic, self-indulgent trauma confessional sometimes associated with the genre. We understand that the subject of personal writing is the material and embodied experience of the writer’s self, but it is also a reflection and analysis upon that experience, so that, in the words of Patricia Donahue and Mariolina Salvatori, personal writing “creates a bridge between writer and reader by using […] experience or reflection as an example of something larger” (85).
Yet personal writing is sometimes opposed to academic writing, as if the academic can never be personal. This opposition can performed for analytical convenience, as when Peter Elbow offers four characteristics that distinguish “personal expressive writing” from “academic discourse”: authors of academic discourse seek a “larger perspective that shows how their position relates to the positions other people have taken or might take on the topic”; a focus on “claims, reasons, evidence [and] argument”; a straightforward organizational mode in which “points […] follow reasonably from one another, and the skeleton of the argument is prominent”; and “a certain impersonality” that “favor[s] control over abandon” (315-316). Elbow demonstrates that those four apparently defining characteristics of academic discourse can apply just as easily to “personal” writing — which, he points out, “usually involves being personal in relation to others” (317). “What I like about personal or expressive writing,” he explains, “is how it usually asserts what is at stake for the writer” (317). In other words, personal writing foregrounds concerns of value; value that can take different forms within the same essay. These disparate or diverse modes of valuation are what gives personal writing its complex and multivalent power, and I want here to try and show how those modes of valuation operate.
In their recent textbook, Donahue and Salvatori present two different types of work: the difficulty paper and the academic essay. Both are constructed as a reader’s response to a text: not what we might ordinarily understand as a personal essay. “The difficulty paper presents a reader engaged in the process of reading; describes the difficulties encountered by a single reader in the reading process; cites from text, in order to make its examination of difficulty more specific, and places a text within the context of a single reader’s interpretive perspective.” “The Academic Essay,” on the other hand, “Presents a reader who has completed a reading; defines the challenges encountered by the general reader; cites from the text to provide evidence of claims; and places a text within the context of a general practice of reading or a larger context.”
Note that the quality that separates these forms, in each instance, is the degree of distance from reader’s experience of the text. I believe that same quality — the degree of distance from the experience of a text — is what also separates Peter Elbow’s believing and doubting games. Peter characterizes the believing game as “the disciplined procedure of not just listening but actually trying to believe any view or hypothesis that a participant seriously wants to advance” (260), and its counterpart the doubting game as “the systematic, disciplined, and conscious attempt to criticize everything no matter how compelling it might seem” (257). One is a self-conscious and self-monitoring inhabiting of the perspectives of a text, and the other is a self-conscious and self-monitoring distancing of oneself from a text’s perspective.
Now: as a last parallel, consider the combination Salvatori proposes of “two reciprocally monitoring techniques: a self-reflexive ‘hermeneutical’ critique and a ‘deconstructive’ one. The hermeneutical critique posits the necessity for the knower/reader to understand herself in the act of understanding,” while “The deconstructive technique posits the necessity for a reader/thinker to expose a text’s fissures […] as indications of ‘that system’s possibility'” (81-82). Again, the focus here is on reader and text; a sort of two-party system of reading and writing. I want to argue, though, that we can understand lived experience itself as a text, and we can ask our students to perform that same combination of moves — that closer-to-experience believing or hermeneutic move and that further-from-experience doubting or deconstructive move — in their individual personal writing as well as in their reading.
For Salvatori and Donahue, the complementary work performed by reading and writing, and by the difficulty paper and the academic essay, synthesize textual production and textual consumption. While the two types of work Salvatori and Elbow describe are in some ways opposite, they are necessarily complementary, as well. In fact, Jane Hindman — in her discussion of personal writing — demonstrates how the question of “how to write, or how to produce, an embodied rhetoric” is deeply connected to the question of “how to read it” (14). In the writing classroom, textual production and textual consumption are both forms of valuable student labor — forms that are increasingly important in several ways to today’s rapidly changing information economy. In Empire, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri describe “immaterial labor” as “labor that produces an immaterial good, such as a service, a cultural product, knowledge, or communication” (290). There are three varieties of immaterial labor: first, “an industrial production that has been informationalized,” second, “analytical and symbolic tasks,” and third, the emotional work involved in “the production and manipulation of affect” (293). In an economy increasingly driven by technological change, such immaterial labor is increasingly important. In fact, all three of Hardt and Negri’s forms of immaterial labor are present in the composition classroom, in the instrumental, critical, expressive, and social purposes of writing.
The “production and manipulation of affect” described by Hardt and Negri is precisely what personal writing is and does, in the hermeneutic inhabiting of the experiential moment of the production of affect, and the deconstructive unseaming and exploration of how that affect functions in a broader social context — and Hardt and Negri contend that immaterial labor carries political and economic value. I take as confirmation of this new valuation of personal writing Julie Lindquist’s assertion that “emotions are a form of work, subject to the pressures and perils of the [capitalist] marketplace” (195). Lindquist is talking about economic market transactions — but we understand, of course, that emotional labor takes place in contexts other than market transactions, as well: what economists call independent transactions, feudal transactions, and gift transactions, among others. Given such a circumstance, personal writing as it functions along those two axes I’ve charted in Salvatori, Donahue, and Elbow can carry economic, political, and social value within the classroom in ways previously unseen.
Much of the debate over the place of personal writing in the classroom has been over its value: what is it for, we ask; how can we use it; how will it improve students’ writing skills. These questions ascribe an instrumental value to student writing, a value temporally distant from the present and embodied work of the classroom. Considering personal writing in this way is problematic, particularly in light of Bruce Horner’s contention that “In Composition, the social is recognized only as something already formed, in the past, which affects what students may bring with them to the course […], not as a process operating during and within the course,” and “the dominant mode for addressing the difficulties such students ‘present,’ when they are addressed at all, is in terms of ‘personal’ problems” (Horner 36).
An approach that commodifies personal writing solely for its projected future instrumental value occludes the material present-time evidence of its connection to the social. Horner proposes “representing students as above all else workers, working on themselves, Composition, the academy, and the social” (35), with “the social” understood “as an ongoing, heterogeneous material process operating within as well as outside student consciousness, the site of teaching, and writing” (37), with “the social” understood as personal in the way it shapes students’ immediate lived experience. While the emphasis on “ongoing” is Horner’s, I see a connection in that emphasis to the way that hermeneutic/believing move in personal writing performs the inhabiting of experience as present-tense and immediate, while the deconstructive/doubting move temporally and experientially distances the reader/writer from that present-tense immediacy. The concreteness and particularity of personal writing is temporally present, based on the particularity of moments and concrete situations, whereas academic writing’s drive to abstract and to theorize transcends that temporal immediacy. Hermeneusis operates deeply in the experiential “now.”
Personal writing is writing valued for its clear connection to the circumstances under which it is produced, in the context of an economy of meaning. Dominant perspectives, on the other hand, seems to privilege transactional writing; writing oriented towards a specific audience for the sake of getting things done. Transactional writing is valued for its conscious contribution to and instrumental attempt to alter the circumstances of an economy of meaning. In other words, personal writing focuses on the present, while transactional writing focuses on the future.
Furthermore, Julie Lindquist argues that those dominant perspectives posit a pedagogy wherein “Teachers act as institutional agents of emotional management, while students are asked to render successful affective performances to create viable personae as middle-class critics and producers of discourse” (197). And yet many of our discipline’s representations of personal writing — both in student essays and in the contemporary proliferation of weblogs — construct such writing as somehow unmanageable, as smitten with its own materiality, its own presence. That smitten quality, I want to argue, is what places the value of such writing in the immediate “now” of the classroom, as use value, rather than deferring it into the future as exchange value.
When Jane Hindman counterposes the “affective” to invocations of the future-tense economic rationales for writing from Joseph Harris and Gesa Kirsch, she’s talking about the “affective” as that unmanageability and present-tense value that defines personal writing. The affective labor of personal writing offers an immediate and present political, social, and economic agency for the classroom, rather than constructing such agency as somehow beyond the bounds of the classroom, as deferred outcome that will happen after the moment of writing. Julie Lindquist writes of allowing “students to ‘own’ the products of their emotional labor, so that they may learn from them rather to exchange them for good grades,” (198) but we should understand that the refusal to defer the value of writing results in writing that students always already own. In such writing, political economy is personal.
Transactional approaches to writing view the composition classroom as preparatory for work in a global information economy, whether that work occurs in the context of success in future courses or success in a career. As such, that preparatory work is the sine qua non of the classroom: if the teacher is generous, other forms of work might happen as well, but the horizon of value is largely distant. Even the approaches to composition that invoke Freirean perspectives have a commodified component in that they typically view the purpose of classroom work as being to awaken the student to a political situation in order that she might effect later change. Change in consciousness is a present value, but the ultimate horizon of value — social or political change — is, again, always distant.
As Bruce Horner frames the problem, “student writing is evaluated as a commodity while being produced and distributed in ways that guarantee its lack of [present] exchange value” (50). An exclusive orientation towards transactional writing creates a future-oriented focus on pedagogical outcomes that Horner suggests “treats the students, their skills, or their consciousness as commodities” and so “abstracts the labor of composition, denying its materiality by concealing the contribution of not just teachers but students, institutions, and specific social, material, historical circumstances” (18). When academics ask to what ends personal writing might be put, they’re performing an abstracting and commodifying move. Personal writing need not be for anything other than itself-as-writing. Its value is in its doing, and — in fact — such writing can work against those tired so-called “critical” assignments that rely upon a vague rhetoric of individualism and positioning while ignoring individual and institutional context: such assignments are simultaneously solipsistic, generalized, and abstracted from any concrete and particular context. Personal writing is worthwhile in its groundedness, in its connectedness, in its smitten, material, done-for-its-own-sake non-exchangeable non-equivalent value: in its Use Value.
Now: I want to argue — though I’m not certain — that the transactional approach to writing favors the deconstructive moment, the taking things apart, seeing how it works. Transactional writing is reader-centered writing, commodified, exchanged for a purpose. In the believing game, I think Peter focuses on writer-centered writing; the immediacy of use value, and the refusal of commodification. But when the two tendencies are taken together in the context of personal writing — believing and doubting, hermeneutic and deconstructive — there is a balancing, liminal moment at the point of writerly production where the writing’s value hovers between use and exchange. Its value, and the temporality of that value’s horizon, is heterogeneous, present as well as distant.
Let me make perfectly clear that I am in no way arguing for the elimination of pedagogies that carry a future-focused orientation on writing skills. I’m not at all saying that transactional writing is bad and we should be entirely engaged in present-focused expressive writing: such a position would be absurd. Rather, I’m arguing towards a pedagogy that opens up room for both the future-focused and the present-focused; a pedagogy that allows for (and perhaps necessitates) a diversity of purposes for writing. And it seems to me there’s one particularly interesting form of personal writing that combines the transactional future horizon with the expressive present horizon in a way that makes understanding visible. Weblogs, I think, are today the best instantiation we have of a complex, polyvalent, processual form of writing that freeze their expressive value in the now while at the same time extending their transactional value into that distant horizon. They are often informal, affective, perhaps in some ways unmanageable, but in the way their posts are conspicuously dated, weblogs make knowledge and its development visible and conspicuously temporal, while giving it a socially constructed component via the interactivity of comments. Finally, as Clancy Ratliff’s work indicates, they are deeply — albeit not always overtly — political, as well. In all these qualities, they perform that synthesis of hermeneusis/believing and deconstructing/doubting privileged by Donahue, Salvatori, and Elbow.
Hermeneusis/believing is an inhabiting-of, a highly present self-aware and reflective understanding of the constructed nature of a knowledge, its terms, how it comes to be, and all that makes it possible, seeing and inhabiting the circumstances that lead to its construction and simultaneously being and monitoring its belief-system. Deconstructing/doubting is a being-in-alterity, a future-looking critique, an unspinning of a notion’s inherent contradictions and in so doing makes visible the limits within which and by which that notion or knowledge is produced. The immaterial labor of personal writing in general, and weblogs in particular, collapses the hermeneutic and the deconstructive, the believing and the doubting, into a liminal wave or oscillation between present and future, expression and transaction. In these qualities, personal writing carries unique and complex political, social, and economic power that compels renewed investigation.
Acknowledgements:
The point of origin for this presentation was Jenny Edbauer’s writing on what she called the “general equivalency” of value for student essays. John Lovas added useful perspective, as did my co-presenter Sharon Gerald, and Joanna Howard, who I wish had been able to join us in Chicago. I’m grateful, as well, to Peter Elbow for serving as respondent, and to Mariolina Salvatori for her mentorship. Finally, more than anyone else, Clancy Ratliff’s questions and comments pushed and expanded and helped to produce the ideas I’ve presented here.
Works Cited:
Elbow, Peter. Embracing Contraries: Explorations in Learning and Teaching. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986.
Elbow, Peter. Everyone Can Write: Essays Toward a Hopeful Theory of Writing and Teaching Writing. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.
Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. Empire. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000.
Hindman, Jane. “Thoughts on Reading ‘The Personal’: Toward a Discursive Ethics of Professional Critical Literacy.” College English 66 (2003): 9-20.
Horner, Bruce. Terms of Work for Composition: A Materialist Critique. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000.
Lindquist, Julie. “Class Affects, Classroom Affectations: Working through the Paradoxes of Strategic Empathy.” College English 67 (2004): 187-209.
Salvatori, Mariolina, and Patricia Donahue. The Elements (and Pleasures) of Difficulty. New York: Pearson Longman, 2005.
Salvatori, Mariolina. “Toward a Hermeneutics of Difficulty.” Audits of Meaning: A Festschrift in Honor of Ann Berthoff. Ed. Louise Smith. Portsmouth: Boynton/Cook, 1988. 80-95.
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