Composition Theory

Help Me, Gertrude

preterite Composition Pedagogy, Composition Theory

(With sincere apologies to Gertrude Stein.)

Position that is in wood. A research called philosophy shows shudders. In the job letter there is falling whereas the reference has no cut of all the fallings. It is not cheese except when it is and when it sleeps. To consider a lecture, a dissertation abstract, when it is cooked is so anxious, and not mildly, shows the force of application and a reason. A recommendation always inside a conundrum, meaning an embarassment, belongs to the deadline and the time that makes time of reference change visibly. Burnt abstract applies behind curriculum. A letter makes cheese for an eyesight casserole and an exchange. The instruction is to stop: there was not yet December for the sample and the hotel. There are not crashes beyond tape and food or the bar. When we talk we know that teaching is green for dentistry and nodding. There are flowers that are projects.

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The Preterite Proletariat

preterite Composition Theory, Rhetoric

I hadn’t realized how busy I’ve been, but looking back and seeing that I haven’t posted in a week — well, I guess I’ve been busy. I’ve kept meaning to respond to the excellent things Clancy and Jenn have had to say about Kelly Ritter’s CCC plagiarism article, but revisions to dissertation chapters, getting the class weblogs going, gearing up for the job search, and prepping two pieces for publication have kinda gotten in the way.

So a quick thought tonight while I’m working on one of those pieces for publication: in his response to my three posts on the Wayne Booth rhetoric carnival Collin Brooke hosted (could that really have been only seven months ago, with John’s comments there and him now gone?), the Happy Tutor scolded me (in his generous and inimitable manner) for suggesting that a rhetoric that said different things to different people could be useful or ethical. My comment was in response to Booth’s caution “that one form of careful listening can produce one of the worst forms of deception. Really skillful rhetors can invent language that is intended to mean one thing to ‘insiders’ while appeasing ‘outsiders’” (121), and I offered in response Shadi Bartsch’s suggestion that “the discourse used before powerful figures, especially on occasions when it had an audience ready and willing to find unstated meanings, could undermine its own contents and the authority of the addressee. The meaning granted a given act, in interactions with emperors or their agents, was not always and not necessarily the sole province of the powerholder” (Actors in the Audience 65). The Happy Tutor wondered whether that wasn’t rather Straussian of me, to suggest that texts could or should be simultaneously (to use Strauss’s terms) esoteric and exoteric; that texts could communicate radically different or even opposite things to different audiences. (My favorite example is Cicero’s Pro Ligario, but Bartsch invokes the Dialogus de Oratoribus of Tacitus as another excellent example, as well as Quintilian’s borrowing from Cato the Elder of the ideal rhetor figured as a vir bonus dicendi peritus.)

And that made me think: Bartsch, Booth, and Strauss. All University of Chicago professors. Is there some institutional habit of thought that turns people at the U of Chicago towards problems of hermeneusis? But more significantly: isn’t this attention to the meaning-behind-the-meaning and the complexities of the hermeneutic unveil — isn’t this exactly the same thing that critical pedagogues purport to do? To show the text-behind-the-text, to help students see how ideology and interpellation truly function in today’s popular texts of advertising and mass media? Doesn’t critical pedagogy necessarily construct an excluded preterite proletariat who may never see the truth of how they are constructed/oppressed by discursive forces, as well as an elite who (having been coached by the insightful academic) speaks the shibboleth and “gets it”? Have left intellectuals like Giroux and Shor made the cultural-studies inheritors of Freire into the inheritors of the arch-conservative Strauss, as well? In sum: has Freire’s ideal of critical pedagogy, through a conception of texts simultaneously esoteric and exoteric, been co-opted into yet another instrument of domination?

I wish Booth would have had more to say on the topic.

Publishing Land Mines

preterite Composition Pedagogy, Composition Theory, Computers

Some good, smart people have already noted the troubling nature of a certain journal publisher’s attitude towards intellectual property, as well as the troubling nature of said publisher’s business practices. It’s rather more difficult to describe as merely “troubling” the fact that said publisher is involved in connected (via parent company Reed Elsevier; see comments below) to the international arms trade.

It might be worth thinking about the ten million land mines and eight thousand amputee children in Angola before submitting that article to Computers and Composition.

About That Carnival

preterite Composition Theory, Economics, Writing

Kelly Ritter, in the abstract to her June 2005 CCC article, “The Economics of Authorship: Online Paper Mills, Student Writers, and First-Year Composition” (CCC 56:4 601-631), suggests that “the consumerist rhetoric of the online paper mills construes academic writing as a commodity for sale,” and that “such rhetoric appeals to students in first-year composition, whose cultural disconnect from the academic system of authorship increasingly leads them to patronize these sites” (601). In this prefatory one-sentence abstract of Ritter’s article, there are things that immediately jump out at me. First, terms: note that “commodity” indicates an object with a certain exchange value, but that the modifier “for sale” indicates a monetary exchange value for the object. This distinction between exchange value and monetary exchange value is both hidden in and central to Ritter’s subsequent discussion of what she terms “economics.” Second, note the interrelationships already evident among the terms “economics,” “cultural,” and “academic.” In their treatments of socioeconomic class, such scholars as Ira Shor, James Berlin, Henry Giroux, and Lynn Bloom all perform a move similar to the one that Ritter performs in her article’s concluding recommendations: they name an economic (or, for Ritter, monetized) problem, and then suggest a cultural (for Ritter, non-monetized, or academic) solution. This is an all too common practice: to perceive some economic problem, but to also see the economy as beyond intervention, and so to suggest a remedy for the problem as action within an non-economic sphere. Bloom, in her (famous or notorious) articles on class, admits that inequality in wealth and income (i.e., monetary inequality) is what drives class distinction, and then recommends that students adopt and internalize certain cultural practices to remedy such inequality: society’s structural problems are internalized into identity politics. Ritter, in the conclusion of her article, strongly suggests that the internalization of identity politics is a viable (perhaps the only?) solution to our contemporary problems associated with plagiarism, digital reproducibility, and intellectual property.

I think there’s much of value in Ritter’s article, particularly — as others have noted — in her deployment of the distinguishing term “whole-text plagiarism,” and although I wish she’d done more with the excellent work of Rebecca Howard and Margaret Price, I found her extended and multifaceted treatment of authorship issues a helpful spur to the work I’m trying to do on student intellectual labor and intellectual property in the classroom in my dissertation’s fourth chapter. But, as is likely already clear, I’m coming from a very different perspective on what Ritter calls “economics,” and so I’ll here try to be as respectful as possible in pointing out why I think Ritter’s perspective on property, labor, and economics is somewhat limiting.

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Class and Visual Rhetoric

preterite Composition Theory, Rhetoric

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.

On Fulkerson

preterite Composition Pedagogy, Composition Theory

Hot and humid summer day in DC. In the past, I’ve done plenty of 4th of July celebrations on the Mall between the National Monument and the Capitol, but — with all the security stuff and the crowds — not much inclined to this year, so it’s out to the family’s old no-longer-rural farm for the afternoon. I met up with Joanna for iced coffee drinks yesterday afternoon, and it was good to chat with her for a while.

Lately, I’ve been feeling like the kid stuck inside doing dissertation homework, looking out the window watching everybody else go to the carnival. Well, hell, I figure: I got a couple chapters turned in, and I’ve lately gone back through a couple hundred pages of Raymond Williams; why not spend at least a day over at the Fulkerson Fair?

I share the sentiments of those who found Fulkerson’s retrospective artice — save for its somewhat forcedly polemical ending — rather uncontroversial: to me, there simply wasn’t much that was startling in there. I do think he starts out making an apples-and-oranges comparison with his two texts; differences he sees as “representing a growing ‘scholarizing’ of the field” (657), I see as rather obvious differences in the texts’ genre, audience, and purpose. Eight Approaches to Teaching Composition is a more of a textbook for teachers, aimed at helping new practitioners position themselves within the classroom, while the historical-bibliographical “surveys” of A Guide to Composition Pedagogies are clearly aimed at giving new scholars in composition a sense of the landscape of the discipline — which I think explains quite well the differences Fulkerson rather unfairly complains about on page 672. For that reason, the thrust of Fulkerson’s critique — aimed at the theoretical Balkanization of composition — seems misplaced, since the problem that constitutes the exigency of his critique is essentially that we work through a diverse array of theoretical rationales in service of a somewhat more unified array of practical ends. And on that topic, there’s plenty that’s been said in our literature and elsewhere about the relationship between theory and practice, but that’s not a debate Fulkerson seems interested in pursuing, and — at the moment — nor am I.

Still, there are some obvious points of connection. I was glad to see him bring up Flower and Hayes on page 669: having taken one of Hayes’s cognitivist psychology classes, I’ve often found it curious that compositionists draw a strong distinction between the theoretical scholarship and qualitative research done by Hayes and Flower on cognitive processes and the practical classroom assumption that writing is a process. As Fulkerson points out on 670, “linear rigidity was never faithful to what the process researchers learned,” and people who critique assumptions about what they mistakenly call the writing process are making a category error: again, the fundamental insight is that writing is a process, often sloppy and recursive, but not “formulaic.” The work of Flower and Hayes and our work in the classroom are two sides of the same coin, and perhaps one of the most easily visible correspondences between theory and practice in our field.

Such correspondences between theoretical outlook and classroom practices seem to be what Fulkerson addresses in point 7 of his “Conclusions and Implications” with his characterizations of various institutions. Certainly, “University of Pittsburgh grads are into cultural studies” (680), and that function of the Pitt English Department’s scholarly orientation shows up in the Pitt Writing Program’s first-year composition courses — which are rather different from the University of Massachusetts first-year composition courses, with that being a major motivation for my coming from one institution to the other. I’m not making a value judgment here, but rather pointing out a self-conscious desire of mine to inhabit as broad an understanding as I could of composition’s diverse theories and practices: I find much to recommend the orientations of both programs, and I think those orientations can coexist in our field. So in that sense, I’d take issue with Fulkerson’s use of Gary Olson’s — yes, I think hyperbolic — quotation about “theory wars” in ending his article (681). The assumption seems to be that the different “axiologies” Fulkerson describes cannot co-exist in one course, or at least cannot co-exist with any sort of pedagogical rigor (and the menu analogy he uses to make this point struck me as facile and reductive), but he seems to ignore the fact that he’s borrowed the term “expressive” from James Britton, who argued that a variety of purposes of language use (including the transactional, which seems to be the equivalent of Fulkerson’s catch-all kitchen-sink “rhetorical” category, and the poetic) can and do co-exist in all individuals.

To borrow Leonard Cohen’s words: “There is a war between the ones who say there is a war / And the ones who say there isn’t.”

CW05: Materializing Resistance

preterite Composition Pedagogy, Composition Theory, Computers, Economics, Writing

Apologies for taking so long to put up my last panel notes — kind of got a whole bunch of different things going on right now. I was also kind of anxious because, to be honest, it was one of the best panels I saw; Jim Ridolfo and David Sheridan and Tony Michel fit their presentations together really well thematically speaking; but I also liked it because I saw so much in it that intersected with my research interests and offered me some new and startling insights. All three focused, in one way or another, with the intersection of multimodal discourses with the discourse of the civic, as their panel’s subtitle (“Digital Rhetoric as a Civic Technology”) might demonstrate, but all three were very careful to acknowledge a sophisticated awareness of the many problems associated with the privileging of civic discourse, which made me happy — one so rarely sees, in our field, an acknowledgement that the public sphere was initially theorized as a bourgeois space.

Jim’s presentation, “Rhetorical Veloooocity!!!: The Economics of the Press Advisory and Tactics of Activist Delivery,” dealt with his work at Michigan State with the Worker Rights Consortium, composing activist press advisories with the knowledge and intent that the language of those advisories may be appropriated by the press. Basically, using the example of the sequence of rhetorical production and circulation of these releases, Jim demonstrated the deep connections between rhetorical delivery, re-seen economic theories — of production, distribution, consumption, appropriation, and re-production — and activist strategies for economic change. In fact, Jim argued, the rhetorical canon of delivery can be theorized through the lens of economy, including — in particular — the rhetorical situations in which the mass delivery, redistribution and re-appropriation of writings are the rhetorical objective. In the context of distribution defined as a tactic of delivery planned for economic circulation, Jim’s term “rhetorical velocity” refers to an accelerated delivery tactic (or cycle?) fostering the appropration of texts. He offered the example of a “News Advisory” sent to local papers concerning a protest event that used the words “students will dance vigorously”: two newspapers that actually sent reporters did not use those words, but the paper that did not send a reporter — only a photographer — described the event as “vigorous dancing,” and offered no reporter’s name on the news piece that ran following the event. Jim then showed a timeline demonstrating how quickly that cycle of appropriation operated: press release on Tuesday, event on Thursday, the appropriated-language news piece on Friday. In his conclusions, Jim compared the activist economy, the economy of the reporter, and the economy of media, all on immediate, near, and long-term scales, and noted that these three economies overlap in the ways different parties construct the economic value of a distributed text. Brilliant stuff, and this too-brief description doesn’t do it justice.

David Sheridan’s presentation on “Materializing Ethics and Multimodal Civic Rhetoric” described how different forms of production and semiotic affordances can open up shifting civic opportunities, working from the perspectives of the different but intersecting axes of understanding rhetoric as a material practice and rhetoric as an ethical practice. (And I know that sentence is a huge, mangled tangle of David’s language; I’m hoping he’ll set me straight.) In other words: how do material considerations intersect with rhetorical ethics?

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CW05: Copyright Anxiety

preterite Composition Theory, Computers, Economics, Openness, Politics, Writing

Dánielle Nicole DeVoss, Nancy Allen, and Stephanie Vie gave a presentation titled “Copy-Right Anxiety: File Distribution and Intellectual Property,” and I’m not sure what the hyphenation means — maybe foregrounding the question of whether it’s ethical or right to copy? I didn’t hear them explain it, but that certainly didn’t detract from the quality of their presentations. Dánielle’s focused on using examples of video pastiche to theorize some implications of new media convergence, while Nancy’s had a deeply pedagogical focus on the implications of open source practices for the classroom, and Stephanie’s examined the intersection of students’ attitudes about peer-to-peer file-sharing and their attitudes about plagiarism; the three, taken together, sparked a lively discussion and composed a sort of collective matrix of insight about the nature of intellectual property online.

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Paris and Me, Part 1

preterite Class (Cultural), Class (Economic), Composition Theory, Culture, Economics

What follows is a very early draft of the first half of the Computers and Writing presentation I’ll be giving in Palo Alto next week. I hope you might read it and tell me what’s redundant, what’s missing, and what’s foolish. The presentation’s major logical steps (of which tonight’s argument comprises points 1 through 3) are as follows:

  1. Rhetorical self-production can be understood today as an act of product differentiation or branding; conversely, consumption of products or services can be understood today as a technology of rhetorical self-production.
  2. Foucault’s governmentality — as the relation between technologies of self and technologies of power — is enacted in online writing on blogs and in the relation between individual and commercial institutions. [Sometimes, as implied by (1), the individual and the commercial can blur: see Paris Hilton and Jason Kottke.]
  3. This relation can be problematic in the case of public schools because of unequal power relations and the possibilities for domination. The massive resources of advertisers can change minds and shift opinion in undemocratic ways; more money can equal a larger voice and an increasingly unequal society.
  4. However, (3) is a characteristic of the environment of a mass economy. Today, self-production via branding is indicative of a move towards a distributed, peer-to-peer economy (facilitated by digital technologies) where the power relations we associate with a mass economy are being fragmented and replaced by other relations we haven’t yet completely fathomed.
  5. In this individuated peer-to-peer economy, not all transactions are market or commodified, and the most promising and interesting possibilities for individual agency may exist within non-market, non-commodified transactions.

Here’s the first half, with the second half to follow tomorrow:

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