rhet-comp’s big break (part i)
I’ve been kind of at a blogging standstill lately. I don’t really want to blog about all the fascinating developments in my personal life (capsule summary: I had one! Then I didn’t! Then I did! Now I don’t! Only I kind of do!) and I’m since I’m still in the early stages of working on the C&W project, I don’t really feel like writing too much about that (though it seems to be succumbing to the same malaise that’s been effecting my scholarship all year). It is fun on occasion to post bits about how much I hate NOM and Catcher in the Rye, but it’s been far too long since I’ve posted in earnest anything resembling actual scholarship.
So I’ve decided to serialize my recent essay for RR’s course on composition theory. I’d be interested to broaden its scope a little and maybe use nuggets of this piece as the starting point for a future article, so comments are welcome, invited, and encouraged. The serialization will proceed whenever I remember to update it. The piece is called “Rhet-Comp’s Big Break: Notes on Composition’s First Principles.” It’s essentially a Frankensteinian stitching together of a response to Downs and Wardle’s “Teaching about Writing, Righting Misconceptions: (Re)Envisioning ‘First-Year Composition as ‘Introduction to Writing Studies’” (CCC 58.4, June 2007) and an attempt to put Susan Miller and Raul Sanchez in conversation with one another. I think either of the two parts works, but frankly, I’m not completely satisfied with how the two parts come together. It works, more or less, just not the way I’d like it to.
Part one of the serialized draft begins after the fold.
morning in america
These people have no shame. Do mean things to them as you please. Via Wonkette:
This would almost be funny if it didn’t make me want to be violent.
what a phony
Who’s up for a sequel to The Catcher in the Rye? Well, certainly John David California, the 32-year-old “former gravedigger and Ironman triathlete” who is also the writer of 60 Years Later: Coming Through the Rye, an unauthorized follow-up to the classic novel which everyone thinks is completely deep when they’re fifteen but hopefully grows out of very soon after. Anyway, the new one features an aged Holden Caulfied escaping his nursing home and wandering around the city.
Have I ever mentioned how much I hate Catcher in the Rye? I do. I think the little snarky bit above (about growing out of the novel) is dead on. Of course, I only read CITR well in to my 20s, so I never had the adolescent appreciation for it that has sustained its “classic” status lo these many years. Holden is just a whiny little sot whose supposed insight doesn’t really justify the love people have for this tired little tome: people are hypocrites! adult life is complex and conflicted! girls are weird! childhood is viewed through adult eyes colored by nostalgia and regret! Yeesh. The fact of the matter is … draw close kiddies … Holden is insane. I don’t have a copy of the book at hand (why would I?) but there’s a telling slip where Holden break the other-wise consistent narrative voice and directly addresses his interlocutor, who is his psychiatrist. We’re not supposed to admire this twit, people! He is a mental case, literally. He is so wrapped up in his narcissistic rambing that he’s been locked up. And, no, I don’t buy the “only the insane are really sane” argument. The point is that Holden is incapable of accepting those things, compromises admittedly, that prevent him from becoming a productive member of society. Which, in turn, makes him thoroughly uninteresting to me: he has no dramatic arc, he doesn’t make peace or compromise or adapt or even overcome … he is static and incapable of adapting to growth and change!
Urg.
I’m thinking of making this the first post in a series I might call “The Contrarian,” in which I take up the unpopular opinion simply for the sake of doing so. Thoughts?
a popular misconception
This actually does a fairly good job explaining how I’ve been feeling lately:
"Misunderstanding" by Steve Burke
and so it goes
I’m submitting a panel to the 4Cs with JG, WD, KL, and MK. Here’s my bit:
Speaker 1: Invention: The Crowded House of Writing as a Social Process
The idea of the individual writer as an isolated fount of rhetorical invention has been challenged by research about social and community literacies (Flower, Gee, Grabill), collaborative learning (Bruffee), post-process theory (Kent, Foster), and the so-called “public turn” in composition (Mathieu, Weisser), but this work assumes stable social realms understood variously as “discourses,” “communities,” or “publics.” Conversely, work in a variety of fields—business (Howe, Tapscott and Williams, Brafman and Beckstrom), information science (Shirky, Weinberger), critical theory (Hardt and Negri, Terranova, Virno)—have pointed to the efficacy of temporary, contingent groups such as crowds or the multitude to respond to short-term, immediate problems; that is, they seem to respond to Muckelbauer’s interest in “what particular concepts can do” (44). This paper seeks to argue for the productive potential of contingency by asking how research on crowds and crowdsourcing can be remixed into what we already know about invention as a social process.
Meh. We’ll see what happens. On the whole, the panel is strong, remixing the canons of rhetoric, and my colleagues have told me they think the proposal is decent, but I’m just phoning it in at this point. I’ll be glad to get to Cornell this summer: I think a change of scene and a summer of intellectual vigor will be good for me. Please don’t read that as saying my friends and colleagues don’t provide plenty of i.v.—I love you all dearly even when I am acting like a total hatebag, as I have been lately. But I think Cornell will be good all the same, and I will return to you renewed and revived.
And because I don’t see the point in the half-truths anymore: I was seeing someone, I ruined it, the end. My fault entirely. What a surprise.
I know some good texts to read arguing in favor of critical pedagogy. Can anyone recommend the texts to read for the counter-arguments? I need to see if there’s a way to better articulate my opposition to it, and I’m hoping some decent readings will give me the way in.
on the usability of theory
As a brief respite from writing an essay I’m getting bored of working on (I don’t envy FR having to read it), a bit from a recent journal entry for RR’s seminar, followed with some comments.
I have been trying to account for the usability of theory by turning to Johnson-Eilola and Selber’s description of usability theory in their essay “The Locations of Usability,” and, at first glance, it is tempting to read usability theory as a heuristic to guide our assessment of the value of theory itself. As Johnson-Eilola and Selber explain, usability allows for the assessment of discursive artifacts in expanding spheres of material and textual space: “from very local articulations focused primarily on the text (heuristic evaluations) to slightly expanded articulations examining individual, relatively isolated users (usability tests) to broad views that take into account complex, real-world contexts of use and users (contextual inquiries)” (174). However, what makes this move problematic is that usability theory, while describing a change in scale from a small body of experts to a larger context of situated users, also inscribes a process of what we might call localization: that is, usability narrates a move from the abstract formulation of expert discourse into local sites of situated, contextual use. This makes the question of the usability of theory complicated because of what Dobrin (among others) explains as the distinction “between theory with a small t and Theory with a big T. … Theory—universal, generalizable, grand explanations—cannot reliably answer local problems even while the activity of theoretical speculation itself may be useful, though in a limited way” (11). Usability, then, describes a process that runs counter to the essentializing force of Theory. Postmodern theory too, with its suspicion of grand narratives, universals, and essentialist forces, represents a problem for usability theory, for it undermines the stability of claims to expert knowledge that provide the foundation and starting point for the narrative of localization.
…
My own history as a literature/cultural studies student drawn to rhetoric and composition leaves me suspicious of empiricism, but I think the related theories of empiricism (especially in Flower’s discourse of intercultural inquiry) and usability are valuable because they demand that our theories be accountable for their consequences. Ultimately, then, we might end with a question, not about the usability of theory in terms of design and function, but about the ends to which it is put: What are the consequences, for our discipline, our students, our universities, and our culture, of using theory?
Maybe the “usability” angle isn’t very fruitful for thinking about the use of theory, or its consequences, or the responsibilities we take on when committing ourselves to theory. But I’m still curious about how we might assess the effectiveness of theory. In part, I’m drawn to the idea of applying usability to theory because implicitly it argue that theory is a technology, a way of making, doing, and thinking. Part of the problem, maybe, is that usability (as JJE and SS describe it) seems to depend not only localization and expert knowledge (as I mention above) in ways that become problematic, but also on a certain telos of use. I know this sounds tautological. But my point is that the artifacts that JJE and SS claim usability evaluates are designed and produced with an eye toward what function they will serve.
I’m not sure theory works that way, or even that it should. Should our theories of writing, for example, be determined solely by what we want students to write? Theory grows out of observation and analysis, if you’re an empiricit. I’m not, so I would argue that theory grows out of textuality (and here’s the small bit of my boring essay that I kind of like:
As Barthes would have it, the text is plural, meaning that not only “that it has several meanings but that it fulfills the very plurality of meaning: an irreducible (and not just acceptable) plurality”. The text leads not to a hidden or cryptic meaning—it is not a mystery to be solved—but always leads to more text. The text is thus (unlike the work) not bound to origin or filiation but is “entirely woven of quotations, references, echoes: cultural languages … antecedent or contemporary, which traverse it through and through, in a vast stereophony” (“Work” 60). Barthes writes that this is not question of mere influence or sources but is rather the nature of textuality itself: “The Text is thus restored to language; like language, it is structured but decentered, without closure…” (“Work” 59). Like language, the text exists without origin and without closing upon a signified or upon meaning. Text and the experience of textuality are likened to network, expanding not by “development” but “by the effect of a combinative operation, of a systematics” (“Work” 61). Like a network, the field of textuality does not expand toward a limit—which, in the work, is the limit of meaning—but rather expands ever further the intertextual field, refusing to close upon a final, author-ized end.
In the field of textuality, the consumption of the work is undone; the text “recuperates it as play, task, production, practice” (“Work” 62). That is, the work is product while the text is process: the work is the signified, the intended, the settled and singular statement of the originary author, while the text is the (perpetual) signifier, the accident, the serendipitous, the metonym, the unstable and multiple traversal of the field of textuality. As such, “the Text requires an attempt to abolish (or at least to diminish) the distance between writing and reading, not by intensifying the reader’s projection into the work, but by linking the two together into one and the same signifying practice”.
For me, theory is the experience that Barthes describes here: traversing textuality, articulating and rearticulating across, between, and within discourse. Barthes says such textuality is semelfactive, meaning it lasts only a moment. That might be a question then: How can a theory like the one I am trying to describe here ever come to be useable given that it is of necessity contingent and momentary? Do we need our theories (especially those of us who do textual scholarship rather than empirical research) to be useable? What do we risk either way? What do we gain?
slow burn
Easier to just be miserable, isn’t it? Happiness is hard work. Things we learn along the way ….
real life twitter
This makes perfect sense to me now.