Composition Theory

This is a bit of a long ramble. I’ll offer my notes here on two panels, because I think their differing perspectives — one pedagogical, one professional — intersect in interesting ways: “Writing in Electronic Spaces: Blogs and the Writing Classroom,” with Quinn Warnick, Margaret Ervin, and Fred Johnson; and “What Does Blogging Do? Weblogs, Change, and Middle Spaces,” with Clancy Ratliff and Jonathan Goodwin. Collin Brooke has talked about some of the ways in which our pedagogy does or doesn’t remediate (in Bolter and Grusin’s sense of the term) our professional practice, and vice versa, and he’s pointed out that academic blogging enacts many of the notions of knowledge as processual, embodied, and constructed that we privilege in our scholarship. I’m sure there are some folks who would argue that such a circumstance reflects just as much wanton and silly self-indulgence as did Landow’s Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology fourteen years ago, but I think the talk about blogging — at least in our field — has remained usefully grounded and focused (and so avoided some of Landow’s high-flown excesses), and I’d also argue that some of the criticisms of Landow are themselves overblown. But I’m already wandering off-topic here, so I’ll just say: I’m curious if other people saw interesting or productive connections between the pedagogical and the professional perspectives (with all due disclaimers, yes, about spurious binaries and how the pedagogical is professional, thank you) offered by the two panels.

The first panel, on “Blogs and the Writing Classroom,” featured Quinn Warnick, Margaret Ervin, and Fred Johnson. Quinn began with a reference to Taxi Driver in his title: “Are You Talking to Me? How Academic Weblogs Remediate Human Conversation in the Composition Classroom.” Bloggers build community by inviting discussion in the form of comments, and with the repurposing of weblogs (which I know some folks worry about; the idea that we may be overly domesticating the first genuinely native online genre for school purposes) as they move into academia, how might we use them to improve classroom discussion? Weblogs facilitate the teaching of visual rhetoric, and certainly help as well with many of the goals and strategies outlines in the CCCC Position Statement on Teaching, Learning, and Assessing Writing in Digital Environments” — but we really need to get a better idea of their value in terms of classroom outcomes, argued Warnick. (Mike’s editorializing: well, Quinn, there’s that project that the CCCC Blogging SIG is trying to put together, if you’re interested… ;-)) Successful blogging involves understanding how the presentation of online and real-life identities differs (I understand Warnick’s point, but I wonder if there’s a decreasing of the distance between OL and RL identity as the use of social networking software proliferates), with the implication being that blogging can help students develop their skills at analyzing audience and projecting an ethos appropriate to situation and genre. Composing a notebook-type blog is a different rhetorical task from composing a journal-type blog or a filter-type blog, and Warnick expressed a desire for a fourth genre, a forum-type blog, where students can “just talk.” (Interesting: could one muddle Britton with Aristotle and characterize journal blogs as expressive, notebook and filter blogs as transactional, and forum blogs as epideictic, writing located squarely in the present and for its own sake?) And of course, these differing rhetorical tasks are meant for widely varying rhetorical ends: to return to the outcomes question, Warnick wondered, what is it that weblogs actually do?

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The title of Darin Payne’s presentation, “Globalization and its Discursive Discontents,” of course referred both to the title of Saskia Sassen’s book and to the title of Joseph Stiglitz’s book. Payne offered some propositions for problematization: does globalization temper capitalism’s faith in markets? What degree of interventionism is appropriate in the so-called world economy? Is there to be any undoing of the alleged New World Order? (Mike’s editorializing: cue the Ministry song.) Are we truly saturated in globalization, and is it truly irresistible and permanent?

There are, certainly, changes in economic structures, in ideologies of nationalism and postnationalism and colonialism, in technologies of communication, in the migrations of workers, and in cultural transactions: are all these, then, how we name “globalization”? With such huge and overarching changes, don’t we need to change how we construct the teaching of writing?

(Mike’s editorializing: I’m not sure I buy that cause-effect relationship: there’s an implicit surrender there that feels uncomfortable to me.)

Ultimately, according to Payne, our goal should be to help students simultaneously gain and critique what counts today as cultural capital. And again, I’m being a difficult reader: why the accumulative model, and why the critical model? What might happen, instead, if we were to value writing in and of and for itself? Is the deferral of value an essential component of composition today — or only an essential component of the way we try to sell it to people outside our discipline?

The Web doesn’t merely expand the [bourgeois] public sphere, but also changes what counts as argumentation and information — but what does that mean for our “mainstream” students, and what might it mean for “transnationalism” (Mike’s editorializing again: we all know this term means something different from “multinationalism” or “globalization”) when BlackBoard and WebCT perform the pedagogical equivalent of Coca-Cola-ization? Does engagement equal adaptation, or surrender to hegemony’s regime? According to Payne, the question poses a false binary: globalization can serve either as a teleological force (see Rostow) or as revolutionary force (see orthodox Marxist thought).

And if you’ve been reading me for a while, you know I don’t buy either piece of that binary. Globalization isn’t an end or a change: it’s something that’s happening, right now, in your classroom, in the dorms, in your students’ parents’ houses. In the basement. In that place you were going to make a guest bedroom. On their phones.

These transactions are all about affect. It’s the new work, and it’s the work that many of us are failing to do, and work that explodes out beyond conventional boundaries of valuation.

My loose questions here aren’t posed as problems with Payne’s presentation so much as they’re questions I think Payne usefully raised — and in any case, I think they’re best taken in conjunction with Jenny Edbauer’s excellent Fall 2005 article in RSQ in terms of framing the discursive ecologies for our conversations about globalization and writing. Check it out.

This was an extremely well-attended panel — I counted at least 17 people either sitting on the floor or standing in the corners and along the walls, and yes, it got a little warm in the room. By happy accident, I got to sit next to Jim Ridolfo and chat with him for a few minutes, and there were plenty of other tech luminati in the audience, as well.

Jim Porter began by giving a broad overview of the four panelist’s brief presentations, and I’m adraid my notes aren’t nearly as good as the proposal abstract, so I hope you won’t be impatient with me for heavy use of quotation: according to Porter, Latterell, DeVoss, Eilola, and Selber, “Composing in the digital age is different,” and “the copy-paste function, downloading, [and] peer-to-peer filesharing […] change everything. Plagiarism [is] a common practice [… and …] perhaps even a literacy skill. Plagiarism makes sense. Remixing is how communities build common values; it is how writers achieve persuasive, creative, and parodic effects. Yet the issue is nuanced: We believe in the ethic of fair use; textual theft, fraud, and misappropriation are real problems. […] We need to find an ethical middle space that encourages fair use but that also promotes free exchange, frequent sharing, and digital remixing—practices essential for building communities, cultures, and coalitions.”

Kate Latterell began with a broad multimedia sampling of remix clips, accompanied by commentary. (I had to strain to hear some of the sound, and I was near the front of the room, so I hope she might think about audio amplification for future presentations.) Sampling and collage are both remix strategies, she argued, and remix stands as our contemporary metaphor for revision, re-interpretation, and hybridity. (I’ll admit, I’m somewhat in agreement with the critique of this definition as an unnecessarily vague collapsing of categories, but that shouldn’t take away from the superlative merits of Latterell’s presentation.) So Latterell asked the perpetually necessary question, the question that modernity can’t stop asking itself: with the overwhelming weight of textual tradition, is there no space for originality, or must we — as Emerson suggests — continue in a practice of perpetual quotation? The pace of the presentation of multimedia remixes — and its juxtaposition with quotations — was swift, and worked well. Sampling, Latterell argued, assumes or recognizes a shared network of meaning, and plays games with memory. It implies a breakdown of known truth and meaning, and implies as well a breakdown of the author/audience relationship — but is this breakdown, Latterell asked, a necessary condition of our contemporary culture? (I’m afraid I’ve here failed to do justice to Latterell’s presentation in my merely textual account, especially with all her carefully ordered multimedia clips and their interpolation with explanations and quotations from media theory.)

According to Jim Porter, there’s a simple view of plagiarism that manifests itself in the plagiarism statements of syllabi, and in the rhetoric of the popular media. Plagiarism is bad and unacceptable; non-plagiarism is good and acceptable. But there’s a gray area in between the two, an area variable and context-dependent. We need to be rhetorical about plagiarism, Porter argued: the particular circumstances of use matter deeply in terms of what gets counted as plagiarism. Is it OK, for example, to use somebody else’s HTML/CSS design template and plug in your own content? What if it’s for a history class? A Web design class? A workplace with an open-source ethic?

In some ways, we are all plagiarists, and according to Porter, the question really ought to be: what constitutes allowable plagiarism?

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Mariolina Salvatori, Patricia Donahue, Sheridan Blau, and Dale Bauer managed that rare combination of insight, charm, sophistication, and grace that makes for the best conference presentations one might hope to attend. Like the Michigan State plagiarism panel (notes to follow soon), they packed the room, with people sitting on the floor and standing along the walls. And they didn’t disappoint.

Mariolina Salvatori began her presentation, “Difficult Theory,” by proposing a hermeneutical argument for framing the difficulty students encounter as possibility. Her interest in difficulty as a useful pedagogical concept, she said, came out of a moment in teaching King Lear, which was “unnecessarily difficult,” according to one student. In fact, the student’s indictment of textual difficulty identified two of the key components of the text, and the so-called difficulty was actually an indication of the richness of interpretive possibilities. This, to Mariolina, was the central “Janus-like” feature of difficulty, its dual status as resistance and possibility. She then moved to the central text for her presentation, albeit one with which she admits considerable differences: George Steiner’s “On Difficulty.” For Steiner, there are four (broad and porous) categories of difficulty:

1. Contingent difficulty: the need to look up words and the like;
2. Modal difficulty, which Steiner also characterizes as “parochial”; difficulty not necessarily removed by immediate recourse to reference;
3. Tactical difficulty: linguistic, structural or conceptual concerns that need to be actively processed; and
4. Ontological difficulty, which confronts the reader with “blank questions” about language and the world: one example that came up later was that of holocaust literature.

While this taxonomy has its problems, Mariolina suggested, the way in which it makes difficulty manageable by naming and categorizing it holds exciting possibilities for engaging student writing. The ways we name things affects how we understand them, so one necessary task is to foreground Steiner’s premises. First: what does naming something as “difficult” do? The assumption there seems to be that difficulties occur when the pact of communication breaks down: Steiner adjudicates power to certain readers who have some sort of special insight concerning the intent of any given text, but the nature of this power is occluded in Steiner’s writing. For Steiner, the difficulties readers encounter are inextricably linked to their historical, cultural, conceptual, and personal alienation, and the act of interpretation results in the effacement of difficulties: for those special certain readers, difficulties lead to understanding, whereas for students, difficulties are a bar to understanding. But if difficulties are a function of readers’ dim or clear understanding of textual intent, Mariolina asked, then how is it that readers develop an awareness of difficulty itself?

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