Composition Theory

Government Property, Public Property

preterite Composition Theory, Economics, Writing

The arriving faculty workshop at West Point continues, with an interesting briefing several days ago from USMA’s intellectual property attorney. The primary point of the briefing had to do with contracts and copyright, and it was this: any intellectual property I produce while at West Point in my official capacity as a faculty member, government employee, and representative of the United States Army does not automatically inhere to me as it would under conventional copyright law. Instead, inasmuch it is produced in the service of the United States Government, it is immediately released into the public domain.

Yeah. Wow. And, given my views on intellectual property, I think that’s pretty cool, although the IP attorney’s acknowledgement of the forthright application of institutional hegemonic force was a little unsettling: most of the time around here, they hide the iron behind velvet for civilian faculty.

There are other implications, as well. Ethical regulations make very clear that I can’t use my position as a West Point faculty member to push a book or an essay, which of course would seem obvious until one raises concerns (as I did with the IP attorney) of context and venue: essays published by West Point faculty in Military Review carry considerably different appeal and considerably different connotative freight from those published in Rethinking Marxism.

The thing that’ll be most difficult for me to get used to, however, is that I won’t be able to ask my students — plebe cadets, this first semester — to make a choice about the status of their essays as intellectual property. Anything they write in and for my class is instantly released into the public domain, and they therefore don’t have to engage with the concerns of choice, motivation, and textual ownership that have lately been so important to me.

Unless, of course, we begin to productively blur the line between work performed in an official capacity and work performed in a personal capacity. Like an institution-wide cadet blogging initiative might do.

Hmmm.

Function and Motivation

preterite Composition Theory

A question for comp folks: in what (likely various) ways do we understand the link between the function of writing and the motivation for writing? How do we connect what a piece of writing does to why the author wrote it?

As you can probably guess, this is a question that evolved in the discussion during my defense yesterday, and I’m still trying to find ways into it.

The later portions of my dissertation rely heavily on the diverse motivations Yochai Benkler charts for engaging in commons-based informational production: intrinsic hedonic rewards (i.e., pleasure), market-based rewards (i.e., material gain), and social-psychological rewards (i.e., recognition and/or affirmation). I think we can apply those motivations to writing, as well: people write for pleasure, for gain, for recognition, and for affirmation. But during my defense yesterday, one of my committee members suggested that there are also what she called “performative political” motivations for writing: one can write in order to perform and enact political change. (The performance is in getting other people to see you do it and prompt an enacted reaction from them; the enactment is the work of actually doing it.) And I totally agree: one reason to write is to change the world around you.

I’ve also tried to synthesize some of the work of Mariolina Salvatori, Peter Elbow, James Britton, and Janet Emig to try and talk about the diverse functions of writing. Britton talks about the expressive function, writing that is close to the self and does something for the self; the transactional function, writing that works to get things done; and the poetic function, writing that is essentially belletristic. I don’t think Britton’s taxonomy is adequate either in completeness or specificity, but Emig adds in the notion of writing to learn, which seems to carve out a space between the transactional and the expressive. And we could probably even throw Aristotle into the mix here, and talk about writing to determine future action, ascertain or prove the nature of past action, and engage in present-tense praise or blame, all perhaps as sub-categories of the transactional. So, yes, the notion of function could certainly use some sorting-out and taxonomizing.

But there are two big questions here:

  1. How do we express the link — if there is one — between motivation and function? (Would constructing a rigorous denial of that link open up interesting possibilities?)
  2. Can writing ever be done entirely for its own sake? What would that mean, and what would that look like? What motivation might one have for engaging in writing for its own sake?

I’d especially welcome examples folks might come up with.

Comp’s Hank

preterite Composition Theory

(Warning: this post contains a really awkward segue, for which I apologize in advance.)

The cats are out back with me as I write, sprawled on their sides, too lazy even to fuss at the birds in the maple tree above. Nothing quite like a hot, sunny Sunday afternoon on the deck with some Hank Williams Senior and a cold beer. References to Hank Senior are a prominent trope in country music, to the point where his influence pervades nearly every country song written today, whether it’s acknowledged or not.

Which sets me to thinking: does composition have a Hank Senior? While country existed before Hank, and has flourished in the years since his death in 1953, I think it’s fair to say that country wouldn’t exist as it does today without Hank. Hank, in many ways, is country music. So does our discipline have a figure like Hank? For classical rhetoric, it’s Aristotle; for contemporary rhetoric, it’s Kenneth Burke. But what about comp?

Albert Kitzhaber’s 1953 dissertation is widely cited in histories of composition, but it’s a historical document itself, and I’m not sure it really has the pervasive disciplinary influence that might grant Kitzhaber a contemporary status in composition similar to the stature Hank Williams holds in country music — although his CCC article ten years later does, I think, continue to shape our practice in important ways. James Kinneavy’s work is certainly monumental, but for me, it seems to belong more on the rhetoric side of rhetoric and composition. And given the ways in which my graduate education and institutional affiliations have shaped my perspective, my view of Donald Murray’s disciplinary prominence may not be shared by others.

So I’m thinking that if there is one figure who holds a stature in composition similar to that of Hank Williams in country music, more than anyone else, it’s probably Janet Emig. While other scholars (including Murray) are associated with the process-not-product philosophy, Emig was instrumental in the development of that philosophy, which — along with her write-to-learn ideas — pervades nearly all scholarship in composition today.

What do you think?

Form, Space, and Synchronicity

preterite Composition Pedagogy, Composition Theory

Shelly at UFO recently raised some really interesting points about length and form and how we manage/regulate information and attention in texts. As powerful a template as the five-paragraph theme may be, Shelly suggests that it’s only useful up to a certain length, and I’m inclined to agree. As a template for writers, the five-paragraph theme makes the question of form-as-organization one less thing a struggling writer has to worry about. But for readers, once you get up over 800 or 900 words, the five paragraph theme no longer offers much help navigating the essay’s form-as-coherence.

A couple days later, Spencer pointed out a discussion of the relation between coherence, the form of the five-paragraph theme, and students’ attention to other aspects of writing. And again, the implicit argument in the passage Spencer points to seems to be that the five-paragraph theme is a tool for managing the resources of attention. For me, seeing Shelly’s and Spencer’s posts within the space of two days was an interesting bit of synchronicity that got even more interesting when I read Peter Elbow’s latest (June 2006) CCC essay on “The Music of Form: Rethinking Organization in Writing” in conjunction with the preface to Richard Lanham’s 2006 The Economics of Attention. For one thing, you’ve got to love Peter’s reference to the five-paragraph theme as “a kind of ‘slam bam thank you ma’am’ organization” (632). But to be a bit more serious: in The Economics of Attention, Richard Lanham begins with the assertion that “information is not in short supply in the new information economy” (xi). Rather, “what we lack is the human attention to make sense of it all” (xi). We don’t have enough time to devote to all this information and sort it out. Like our students, we as teachers “are short of time” (Elbow 631). And time and attention are central concerns for Elbow.

Now: one more connection to add to the pile. According to Elbow, “the most common way that writers bind words and pull readers through a text” is in narrative (634).

In 2001, I wrote a review essay called “The Ends of Narrative Inquiry” for a methods seminar and wound up being entirely too proud of myself for what I saw as my own stylistic

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On Error

preterite Composition Theory

I’m looking for good sources on student error in writing to share with a colleague. Joseph Williams on “The Phenomenology of Error” is an obvious choice, but I’d also like to share a piece that condenses Mina Shaugnessy’s extended point in Errors and Expectations about how the incidence of error goes up as students learn new concepts — in other words, how error itself can be an indication of learning. I remember reading a shorter piece (was it one of Bartholomae’s, maybe?) that made this argument, with some data to back it up, but don’t recall what it was. Help me out?

Francois on Time

preterite Composition Theory, Metadissertating

Francois offers an extremely helpful thought in his response to my recent misreading of his comment. He points out that “There are three moments in the [gift] transaction: giving, receiving, using what has been received,” and this lines up in remarkable synchronicity with the attention I give to notions of temporality in the latter portion of my dissertation. In Chapter 3, I point to how Raymond Williams and Pierre Bourdieu use time as an aspect of the overdetermination of class, and how composition’s definitions of class are conspicuously silent regarding the function of time, especially in the discourse of the “working-class academic,” because — of course — acknowledging time and historical change eliminates the possibility for the so-called “working-class academic” to collapse the difference between class position and class background in order to invoke the argument of authenticity.

The attention Francois offers to the temporally distant commodification of writing skills is important, as well, in the way that what he calls “using what has been given” aligns with Bruce Horner’s ideas about the ways in which we theorize the value of student labor contribute to that labor’s necessary and inherent commodification. Setting the temporal horizon of valuation as distant rather than present is a commodifying act. But in his temporal taxonomizing of the components of the gift transaction — gift, receipt, use — Francois has offered me a useful supplement to the ways I use Mariolina Salvatori’s work on the temporal synthesis of the hermeneutic and deconstructive moves to show that writing that holds truly diverse and heterogeneous value for the students is at once temporally distant and present. This also offers me a way to come back to my argument for a diachronic rather than synchronic way of seeing the economy of the writing classroom: if we don’t look at the classroom as processual, as functioning in trajectories of overdetermined historical change, we completely and abjectly fail to construct a pedagogy that goes beyond mere vocationalism or the teaching of good manners in prose.

This is why I love blogging: for the opportunity to engage with fierce, smart folks like Francois, like Clancy, like Curtiss, who call me on my bullshit and make me clarify my thinking.

The Goldfarmer

preterite Composition Theory, Computers, Economics

Let’s imagine a hypothetical economy. It’s a bit of an odd economy, since it’s partly “virtual” and partly “real,” at least by conventional economic reasoning — but in a way, part of what I’m trying to show with this hypothetical example is that conventional economic reasoning’s binary of “virtual” versus “real” has inadequate explanatory force. Furthermore, that inadequacy carries strong implications for the economic aspects of students’ work in the composition classroom.

Note: a lot of the following might feel a lot more clear if read in the context of the excellent Cory Doctorow short story, “Anda’s Game.”

Let’s ground this hypothetical economy in the Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game Everworld Galaxies of UltimaQuest. I write “ground” because the term “set” would imply that the economy is confined to the world bounded by the environment of EGOUQ, which — as will quickly become apparent — is not true: the game’s economy bursts the bounds of the “virtual” and spills over into the social “real.” And I know these scare quotes are gonna get irritating really quickly, but I hope you’ll bear with me: I’m using both terms, if I can be vulgarly Gallic, sous rature. Anyway: so we’ve got an economy, some aspects (we’ll call them “transactions”) of which take place in-game, others out-of-game. And the effects of those transactions cross that in-game/out-of-game boundary.

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Why We Need Tacitus

preterite Composition Theory, Rhetoric, Rome

The recent Kairos Call for Webtexts has me interested. The CFW says, “we focus on the connections between classical Greek and Roman rhetoric and contemporary digital communication” — and yet the CFW’s three examples (Plato, Aristotle, Isocrates) are all Greek.

Composition doesn’t like the Romans, and especially not the Romans under Empire. (In our disciplinary literature, though not in Classics scholarship, Quintilian gets a pass for his collusion with brutality.) And I wonder whether seeing the rhetorical impulses of a massively powerful and deeply conservative agrarian world power makes teachers uncomfortable. The Greeks were about knowledge; the Romans, power. Questions of true and false versus questions of right and wrong. With such polarities, of course the Sophists might seem like more appealing allies with which to rhetorically align ourselves.

But if you look at Roman rhetoric under the stresses of imperium, you start to see a much more significant connection to the way words work in the world today. You start to see Leo Strauss as the contemporary theorist of the vicious and amoral Roman delatores, and the hopeful rhetoric of the Greek Sophists as an ultimate instantiation of contemporary critical relativism — and perhaps a reason why rhetoric as theorized in relation to power functions differently from rhetoric as theorized in relation to knowledge.

So what might we learn from imperial Rome contra democratic Greece? First: the Sophistic privileging of knowledge (and today as it functions in composition) is naïve under imperium. Like the later Romans — like Tacitus, like Juvenal, like Pliny, like Plutarch — we need a discourse that concerns itself with rhetoric’s relation to power. American rhetoric today carries an impulse towards stripped-down forthrightness characteristic of the early rhetoric under Augustus. Certainly, the style of Tacitus is glittering and pointed, breathtaking in its compression (ask any amateur who’s ever tried to translate him and for pages sought a verb), but unique for its time in its elisions. Most other imperial rhetoric carried a style that lectured and hectored and said what it meant, because it was able to, because it held no political importance. The rhetoric of empire was literary, and fraught with epideictic qualities, because — under imperium — it could not be deliberative.

I figure it’s clear where I’m going with this, and the parallel I’m drawing. The problem is just that imperium, now, is distributed and in fact enacted through distributed rhetorics. Could it be, though, that lecturing and hectoring in the American rhetorical mode that privileges so-called “plain speech” is forthright because it’s easy to oppose? What if we use Tacitus to turn Strauss on his head and argue for a difficult political discourse, an ambiguous political discourse, a problem-posing political discourse that asks questions rather than answers them?

CCCC06: Wrap-Up

preterite Composition Theory, Conference Notes, Economics

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.

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CCCC06: Bullshit

preterite Composition Theory, Conference Notes

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.