Week of 4/7

Ong: “The Writer’s Audience Is Always a Fiction”

While I have some sympathy for what Ong has to say, I don’t think he has things quite right. First, it seems to me that not all writing is commensurate with narrative fiction. For instance, in my paper for this class, I’m arguing that the students constitute an audience, and the syllabus is a text we write for them. If it’s correct that the syllabus is a contract between the instructor and the students (as it’s increasingly being defined in the courts), then I don’t see how the audience is completely a fiction. And what about the audience for such venues as women’s magazines? That audience isn’t completely fictional either. I know Ong doesn’t deny that there are real people who fill the role of audience, but I don’t think he adequately attends to the role of agency—after all, writers may provide clues as to how they’d like the audience to relate to the text, but as agents, the audience members can reject the role(s) being constructed for them, can’t they?

Ong’s example of Hemingway’s idiosyncratic use of demonstrative pronouns, for instance, doesn’t strike me as relevant to all writing. What about writing that doesn’t have a narrator, for example. While Ong’s reading of the way Hemingway sets up the possibility of “camaraderie” with his use of deictic language is elegant, it’s not the case that the audience must enter into the narrator:audience relationship in the way the language offers.

This points to another problem with Ong’s analysis of the writer’s construction of the audience: the audience doesn’t always perform as collectively as he holds it does. Audiences don’t always interact the way he seems to think they do. And finally, Ong’s claim that all writing is relevantly similar to narrative fiction privileges fiction and literature, replicating the relegation of composition to the position of the least important, least interesting aspect of English studies. This article will be useful for my paper, but as I said, I think he only has part of the picture.

Porter: “Intertextuality and the Discourse Community”

The idea of “presupposition” is something I was trying to get at in my critique of “Distibuted Cognition at Work.” The unstated things they seemed to assume that everyone would agree with that I didn’t agree with. And I see now that I placed my focus in the wrong place. I don’t really deny that the goal of the university is in some sense to rank students. I deny that it ought to be, though, and that’s the presupposition that the authors made that I disagreed with. That’s what I was trying so emphatically and insistently to get at.

Just a point of information: Jefferson’s original phrase was not “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness”; it was “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Property.” Quite a difference, huh?

It’s not the same thing to assert that “the audience . . . is as responsible for . . . production as the writer” (38) and to assert that “in essence, readers, not writers, create discourse” (38). The first clause assigns equal responsibility to writers and readers in the production of meaning, the Barthesian capital-T Text. The second eliminates writers from meaning production altogether. That’s a problem. While I’m not sure meaning production is always a fifty-fifty relationship between writers and readers, it does always involve both terms, even if the only reader is the writer. That’s what Foucault tries to get at in his essay “What Is an Author?” which is a response to Barthes’ idea, developed in “The Death of the Author,” that the author plays no part in the production of meaning.

A philosopher named Joseph Margolis has a useful understanding of the subject as emergent that resolves, I think, many of the issues of constraint and (lack of) possibility of subjectivity/agency raised by postmodern theorists that are raised in this article (at least by implication), and Porter does a pretty good job himself. I think that what we do affects the very systems that “constrain” us and out of which we emerge as agents, and Porter provides a concise articulation of this belief. In other words, we needn’t be as fatalistic (or as nihilistic) regarding human freedom as postmodern theory often is. I like this guy. I’ll be reading more of him.


Bruffee: “Collaborative Learning and the Conversation of (Hu)Mankind”

First off, this article was published in 1984, and there’s no excuse for using “mankind” as a gender-neutral noun. Or is Bruffee talking about only males here?

Having read Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions several times, I’ve got to say that I don’t think that the Kuhnian concept of “normal science” is simply transferable to language use as Bruffee indicates Rorty does. If it is, Bruffee and Rorty need to contrast “normal language” with a “crisis”—not with “abnormal language.” And they need to explain, as Kuhn does, what causes the crises that lead to paradigm shifts. Moreover, Kuhn explicitly rejects the notion of paradigm as model, even though that’s how the word “paradigm” has come to be used. Yet, that’s how Bruffee seems to be using it. No, I don’t think this works very well at all.

Nor do I completely accept the idea that “we can think because we can talk” (420). We can do a certain kind of thinking (i.e., so-called logical, rational reasoning) because we can talk, but it’s clear that we can think things for which we don’t have words, and not all thinking is reasoning—we do call some kind of thinking “intuition,” after all. Are we to understand that Helen Keller was incapable of thought before Annie Sullivan signed “water” into her palm? Or is it more accurate to say that Helen Keller couldn’t communicate her thoughts before she acquired language? Moreover, to say that “[t]he way they talk with each other determines the way they will think and the way they will write” (422) strikes me as too strong a claim—influence, strongly influence, yes. Determine? I’m not so sure. I know that this is inconsistent with the postmodern/poststructuralist neo-Nietzschean understanding of language. But I think that this particular understanding of language may be based on a fundamental confusion between ontology and epistemology. In other words, just because we can’t understand something without language’s mediation doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist outside of language. Mediation is not existence.

Finally, I think Bruffee approaches (albeit unquestioningly) the Foucauldian conception of authority and authorized speech when he says “The product of normal discourse is ‘the sort of statement that can be agreed to be true by all participants whom the other participants count as rational’ ” (423). However, on Bruffee’s model, resistance is futile—all we can do is replicate the power relations that inhere in discourses. Resistance would, on this understanding of normal discourse, be counted as irrationality, and thus dismissed. As you may guess, I’m not down with that at all. And his appropriation of Rorty’s notion of “abnormal discourse” doesn’t rid him of this problem. On that view, rationality rests on “gaining one’s point” with a particular community. Again, if rationality rests on acceptance by the authorized community, resistance to the authorizing community remains futile. Clearly, it’s not. Revolutions happen.

Part of Bruffee’s argument rests on a false dichotomy. He asks what would happen if we assumed that people write in order to be accepted, to join, rather than assuming that people write to persuade, to distinguish themselves. But these goals are not mutually exclusive. In fact, we often do one to do the other, with the movement going either way. Sometimes we write in order to persuade that we should be accepted, thus doing both at once.

Finally, the biggest problem I have with Bruffee is also the problem I have with anyone who claims that there is no such thing as knowledge. That statement is a claim to certain knowledge, and thus it is a self-defeating statement. So, “to say that there is no fixed and certain point of reference” (427) is to claim that utterance as a fixed and certain point of reference. And this brings me back to my original point. What Kuhn says about knowledge of things in the world (science) is not necessarily true of knowledge itself. Thus, even though scientific knowledge may be indeterminate without being completely relative, it’s not at all clear to me that the same is true of epistemological claims about the nature of knowledge itself.

Trimbur: “Consensus and Difference in Collaborative Learning”

I really liked this article. Trimbur’s description of left-wing discomfort and the desire “to interrupt the conversation, to denaturalize its workings, and to talk about the way conversation legitimizes itself by its very performance” almost captures the way I feel about life in general and teaching in particular. Almost, but not quite. The problem is Trimbur’s reification of the conversation, the way the agents who participate in the conversation disappear into conversation’s self-legitimizing self-performance.

Trimbur’s critique of Bruffee and Rorty echoes some of the things I said about it myself, so I won’t go so much into that, but the idea of focusing on the disagreement/conflict inherent in consensus is a revelation for me. Back in the 70s and 80s, I worked with several political and educational collectives that sought consensus, and we focused on reaching agreement, so compromise became our focus. I even worked with a professor in the Philosophy department at SUNY Buffalo and trained his medical ethics students in the art of consensus decision-making. But I didn’t know how to deal with certain problems that repeatedly arose. For instance, women often capitulate to men in order to keep the peace. We often let social dynamics other than our common goals keep us from achieving true consensus, in other words. Those of us who worked within these consensus-focused communities knew that we belonged to “ ‘many overlapping, mutually inclusive communities’ ” (469), but we didn’t know how to find the language that would allow difference to work for us instead of against us. Of course, I hadn’t read (or even heard of) Bakhtin at that time; if I had, I might have been able to find the words to explain the problem other than by saying that men were babies who had to be right or their ________s shriveled. Sorry guys.

I guess what I like most about Trimbur’s article is that it points out the ways in which resistance needn’t be futile, the ways in which revolution (or even just change from below) might be possible. Trimbur’s notion of a “utopian” ideal is similar to what I think about universal moral goods: They may not exist, but the idea of them sure can provide a goal/aim for living one’s life. Let me explain. I don’t struggle against injustice because I think justice exists and is recoverable by revolutionary struggle. I struggle against injustice because I think it’s worthwhile to do so, because I think that in doing so, I can participate in the social construction of me as a subject and as an agent. That’s my life’s work, you know—to construct myself, as far as I am able, as the kind of person I have decided it’s worthwhile to be. Part of that involves aiming toward things I don’t believe I can actually achieve simply because those things are worth aiming for. I don’t think that’s naïve. It would be naïve if I actually thought I were going to change the world. I don’t. I think the only thing in this world I can change is me. And I can’t completely control that change. Nonetheless, I think the struggle is itself worthwhile, and it is what gives my life meaning.

Please keep in mind that while I do not reject the notion of the subject/agent like a good postmodernist, I do not conceive of it in Cartesian terms, as the center of knowledge and thus everything else. Nor do I think of the individual as the be-all and end-all of action. I think Emerson and Descartes ruined everything…Well, maybe not everything, but a lot of things.

Back to what all this means for composition pedagogy. Trimbur’s way of looking at consensus is useful precisely as he says it is, I think. It can provide a “critical measure to help students [and others] identify the structures of power that inhibit communication . . . by authorizing certain styles of reading while excluding others” (475). This way of using consensus, in addition to being useful as a “critical instrument to open gaps in the conversation through which differences may emerge” (476), can also introduce the idea of utopian aspirations as worthwhile without the idea that what is worth aiming at must be achievable. The idea that complete consensus might be unachievable yet still worth aiming for is useful for me in this way, too.

Johnson-Eilola & Selber: “Plagiarism, Originality, Assemblage”

What a challenging article! I’ve thought for a long time that “intellectual property” is a strange kind of capitalist entity, predicated on individualism and competition. I still think that, only now I’m not so sure I’m completely alone in my “How Can We Own Ideas?” universe, with the additional insight, gained from this article, that the individualism presupposed by the notion of plagiarism is a Romantic individualism.

I have some sympathy for this point of view, if only because I have a sense of how little there is that’s truly original about my own writing and how few original ideas I have. Most everything I write and think involves synthesizing stuff I’ve read and heard elsewhere. Yet I’ve found in working with students that they consistently and across the board find synthesis the most difficult thing to consciously do while writing—often because they cannot understand how it’s different from plagiarism.

I wondered as I was reading how allowing students to remix and assemble papers would help to prepare them for what they’ll be expected to do in other classes, and while the authors address this issue, their explanation indicates to me once again something that has come up in class after class, article after article: One or two semesters of writing instruction is not nearly enough.

One thing I started to think about while reading this article, although I’m not quite sure what triggered it, is that entrance into a discourse community is also entrance into an activity community. I’m not sure what all of the implications of this are, but I do think that one of the important ones is that authorization to speak is also authorization to act, and that seems significant to me.

Peace to all.