Michael Carter--"Should Writing Be Taught?"

Michael Carter—“Should Writing be Taught”

“The problem for Vitanza is that in our drive to make writing teachable we have unjustifiably defined or constrained writing, establishing boundaries around it, determining and stabilizing it; making it definite and distinct, separate and knowable; presenting it as definitive, supplying final answers or solutions for it”

 “I believe that his radical skepticism of teaching writing is legitimate. I, also, am troubled by the presupposition that his deconstruction of the field brings to the surface. And I can understand why those presuppositions would lead him to conclude that writing should not be taught and that, therefore, the discipline of writing should be undisciplined…But I would like to take that discussion as an opportunity to redefine the discipline” (150).

Carter praises Vitanza’s postmodern critique of writing instruction in “The Three Countertheses,” but instead of ignoring its claims in favor of ignorant self-preservation, Carter determines that it should be grappled with as a step in redefining the discipline.

This chapter “offers a postmodern reconstruction of what it means to teach writing”

--Reconstructive Postmodernism

“At this point I want formalize both concepts and their relationship to each other> Reconstructive postmodernism…represents the attempt…to build a framework for a positive worldview within postmodern indeterminacy…an effort to establish the grounds for an entirely new perspective” (151).

Reconstructive postmodernists tend to agree with the deconstructive critique of modernism but see deconstructive postmodernism largely as an extension of the modern and thus question its resistance to any and all foundations for new structures of thought” (151).

In order to construct a new worldview on the ashes of modernisms failures and within the indeterminacy of postmodernism, Carter defines and exhibits the relationship between postmodern deconstruction and postmodern reconstruction. Whereas postmodern deconstructionists resist “any and all foundations for new structures of thought”  (151)—which prevents any reestablishment of any worldview—reconstructionists seek to establish “working hypotheses” of reality withing the postmodern deconstruction of reality.

Both reconstruction and deconstruction “portray modernity not as the norm for human society, but as a historical aberration, ripe for critique” (153).

Deconstruction	Reconstruction
“portray modernity not as the norm for human society, but as a historical aberration, ripe for critique” (153).	“portray modernity not as the norm for human society, but as a historical aberration, ripe for critique” (153).
no truth; no oneness, no unified self, no linguistic referents beyond language itself; reality is interpretation; history devoid of aim, purpose, and meanings; no good or evil	Process-based postmodern worldview that allows for “working hypotheses” of reality within the postmodern deconstruction of reality.
anti-worldview	allows for possibilities of a worldview
destabilizes modernism by turning the absolute assumptions of modernism into absurdism	recognizes some of the benefits of modernity…without losing sight of the severe consequences those benefits bring
resides in the tradition of Kantian negativism Ex: no God,	creates a new cosmology on which to construct a new way of being in the world. Ex: Pantheism/Panexperientialism The benefit (G/god) remains but is reconstituted into the nature of all things instead of remaining in the modern paradigm as a removed stable entity that decides and controls the universe.
We are the TRUE postmoderns	Supposed TRUE postmoderns define us as “modern neoromanticists” with an ecological and social agenda
being is separated from the experience of being There is no bridge between “out there” and “in here,” which leaves subjects linguistically adrift.	being and experiencing being are inseparable “Experience of being is essential to being, defines being. There is, thus, no essential separation between being and the experience of being” (160).

Question: Is Griffin’s reconstructive postmodernism, on which Carter builds her new ontology of writing, postmodern enough for your tastes?

“I am basing my reconstruction of teaching writing on Griffin…because his conception of a postmodern worldview…is based on a cosmology in which the universe does indeed consists of an infinite and continuous stream of threshold events, ongoing creation, a universe (un)defined by unending beginnings…it uses beginnings, and the implications derived from beginnings, as the (non)foundation for a worldview” (155).

Carter is looking for an in between space, one that resides in the middle of modern foundationalism and postmodern anti-foundationalism, between Vitanza’s three countertheses and the modern discipline of composition.

Vitanza:

Nothing exists-deconstructs comp’s ontology and pedagogy

If it does exist, it cannot be known-deconstructs epistemology

If it can be known, it cannot be taught-deconstructs rhetorical assumptions

Carter then mimics Vitanza’s organization, separating her definitions as responses to the countertheses with subsequent “Relevance for Composition” subcategories.

Counterthesis I:

Nothing [of essence] exists

premise: there is no Truth, Being, universal law, or physis that corresponds in any systematic way to our senses and language

In this counterthesis, Vitanza claims there can be no unifying principles of writing instruction because writing resists systemization, which means we cannot and should not teach writing, at least not in any way that would be sanctioned by a university” (157).

Carter utilizes Griffins archelogical method, which questions both postmodernist deconstruction and modernist foundationalism. Essentially, Griffin questions the Cartesian mind-body dualism that created the desire to rectify the chasm between subject and object. To bridge the two, Griffin bases his reconstructive postmodernism in panexperientialism and the universality of creativity.

·      There are, thus, no essential ontological differences among entities; mind and matter, the apparent “in here” and the “out there” of modern thought, are at their root the same. Mind may possess more creative potential and thus greater opportunity for freedom, but this is a difference in degree not in essence. Therefore we are able to speak in a meaningful way about the correspondence between mind and matter because both are experiencing events, both subject and object (158)

If the cosmos and those experiencing the cosmos have existed in timeless infinite proportionality then there is no difference between the origin of ideas from that outside the mind (physis) or the oblivion of reality outside the mind. Reality is a process devoid of subject-object dependencies.

“Thus, there is no essential ontological separation between being and the

experience of being, no essential difference between the “out there” of

being and the “in here” of experience, no mind-matter issue at all”  (159).

In reconstructive postmodernism, truth is a process of discovery, a working hypothesis that resists the absolute correspondence between ideas and reality. In the place of correspondence truth, reconstructive postmodernism resides in an impermanent process of discovering reality. Language then attempts to “express and evoke modes of apprehending nonlinguistic reality that can more or less accurately correspond to particular features of that reality” (159).

Relevance to Composition

Carter seeks to destabilize Vitanza’s dependence on a linguistic ontology that asserts language cannot be systematized and is, therefore, separate from reality. 

Being and experiencing being are one-in-the-same. Though we experience being in a “more complex and creative form,” language doesn’t separate us from other experiencing beings because all entities experience being on some level.

Language, then, isn’t the shaping and controlling of a reality that may not exist; it is the vehicle for experiencing the experience of being; it is a transport—albeit a capricious transport—for complex and creative experiences of a universal experience.

“Language orders and shapes the experience of being and also, therefore, orders and shapes itself as the experience of being. This reconstructive ontology offers an alternative to the negative ontology of language of Gorgias and Vitanza without imposing a totalizing worldview. System does not come from some true reality outside language; system is inherent in the linguistic experience of being itself” (161).

Counter-counter-thesis for composition (a step back from Vitanza’s gentle embrace of oblivion): “If language can be systemized in this way, then so can composing language and language about composing. Thus writing can and should be taught. What we do as teachers is to encourage student writers to bring language to bear on their experience of language. The goal in this case cannot be mastery, for such absolute control of language (in Vitanza’sconnotations of it) is out of the question. We can, however, help our students understand that their own experience of language is always under construction, help them to see the growth of their experience of language and how that growth contributes to their own growth as their experience of being becomes more complex and creative” (161)

Counterthesis #1

Vitanza	Carter
Nothing [of essence] exists	Entities experience being universally, but humans more complexly and creatively experience being through language.
Language is separate (in here) from reality (out there). No external/universalizing principles for language. Language cannot be systematized, so, therefore, composition cannot be systematized or taught. Language creates reality.	Language is a medium for experiencing the experience of being, which rests on a continuum of how entities experience. Language, while it is always tentative and subject to change, shapes the experience of being as well as itself.
Writing cannot be taught because language is not absolute.	Writing can be taught as a way for students to relate their experience with language and understand how language, which helps shape their reality, is always changing.

Questions:

·      Is Carter dancing around placing humans at the top of the humanist hierarchy of being? She doesn’t separate us from other entities, but she does place us in a more complex and creative role.

·      What separates Carter from the social-epistemic/antifoundational ontologies Vitanza warns about in “Three Countertheses”? He claims that antifoundationalists are “dangerously utopian and blindly ideological” to believe that they can support rationalist motives with a theory/pedagogy that looks outside the individual to support the ability of the individual to gain Knowledge and power. What would Vitanza say to Carter/Griffin’s panexperientialism as a basis for reconstructive postmodernism? What would Carter say in response?

Countertheses II

If anything does exist, it cannot be known: a shift to epistemology.

Who speaks? Cartesis/Humanism=human speaks (human-listener relationship). An individual speaks and thus creates reality.

For Vitanza, the subject doesn’t speak and the listener decodes. Instead, there is no speaker or listener. We are all spoken. It is a game of listening.

Carter highlights the link between the will to authority and the will to knowledge: the will to power. If we as teachers, Carter argues, teach writing as a way to exact control or authority over language, then writing should not be taught. Writing resists control and authority. It cannot be had.

Whereas modernists assert authority over language, and therefore reality, by relying on empirically vetted sensory data, and in place of deconstructive postmodern critiques that empiricism cannot be universalized because it is individually based, reconstructive postmodernism destabilizes the basis of sensory perception as the way of knowing, which undermines both modernism and its illogical extents in postmodernism. Essentially, sensory perception is a secondary way of knowing: “it doesn’t matter to what degree knowledge from the senses is constructed; deeper structures of knowing allow us to make tentative knowledge claims about reality” (165).

Additionally, Carter asserts both modern and postmodern epistemologies privilege the individual knower. Instead, we are interlinked; there is no self. “All entities share the essence of experience and, through these shared essences, have nonsensory experience of other actualities beyond themselves” (166).

Our experience is primordial, apart from the solipsistic moder/postmodern epistemologies.

Question: Are we back to Plato’s elements in a way?

Relevance to Composition

We shouldn’t teach writing as a will to power, but rather as a “connectedness to reality.” “As authors of language, we share in this universal being and knowing—a very different sense of being its author(ity). This is not a form of authority that is in any way external, imposing” (167).

“As beings who possess an awareness of language as language, we possess an authority that is represented in our ability to play with language, to construct it, mold it, enjoy it, talk about it, learn about it, and teach it” (168).

Question: Does this shift writing away from being “a way of knowing” toward “a way of enjoying the attempt to know”? What does this look like in the classroom? If we as writing teachers are to heighten our students’ awareness of language as language, how do we avoid our students seeing language as something to be gamed (controlled and won) instead of something that helps them participate “in more complex and creative ways in the shared essence of being”?

Counterthesis III

If anything can be known, it cannot be communicated

Vitanza’s skeptical rhetoric of composition:

(1) there is no viable, productive relationship between theory and practice, that is, theory does not submit to the practice of writing; and

(2) even if there were such a relationship, theory could not be communicated, that is, it could not be taught.

Because language’s referent is language, communication only relates back to itself, not an external reality. Therefore, theory resists theorization and “theory-talk.”

Carter believes this is actually the linchpin that holds his philosophy together. Language “perpetuates the illusion of a unified and knowable reality” (168).

Because theory resists utilization, composition pedagogies and theories are limp hopes.

For Vitanza the fault line lies in conceiving of theory from practice. Teaching writing as an embodiment of theory foregrounds praxis/teaching over theory. “In our rush to define a writing that submits to teaching, we have ignored the inherent disjunctions between theory and pedagogy” (169).

Carter agrees with Vitanza that “We have not been sufficiently suspicious of our assumptions about theory and practice,” but instead of saying this upends writing instruction, Carter again turns to process postmodernism.

Carter sees Vitanza’s pendulum as swinging too far away from the modernism he critiques. In resisting the Oneness of modernist theories, Vitanza embraces, in extremity, theory over practice (just like the modernists) but does so in a way that “disallows any possibility of theorizing, or communicating, a practice of writing” (170-71).

Process postmodernism theory-praxis relations rest on pragmatic, hard-core commonsense notions, which most people presuppose in practice while denying them verbally (171). “They are privileged as beliefs because we are prepared to act on them, but they are not beliefs in the usual sense of verifiable propositions” (171).

We can talk about theory in the process model, but because the ineffable substrata of hardcore common-sense beliefs filter theory, it is “an ongoing, ever incomplete, cooperative effort among people who offer many different perspectives on it” (171).

Modernism		Deconstructive Postmodernism		Reconstructive Postmodernism
(1)Theory defines and unifies practice making it logical.		(3) Instead, theory is adrift and in reference to nothing practical. Also, like modernism, privileges theory.		(4) Theory and practice define each other. “What we do tends to make sense, and not just idiosyncratic sense or sense within cultural mores but sense that runs broader and deeper than that” (172).
	(2) Sees modernism’s theory-praxis relationship as one in which practice defines theory.

Question: This is the part of Carter’s chapter I struggled with (and enjoyed) the most. Is she saying the sum bases of our experiences are so thick that our attempts to filter theory through those substrata make theory-talk difficult but not futile? Any other ideas?

Relevance to composition

Since practice and theory are inextricably looped, the communication of theory resists the totalization of language as a pathway to knowledge. Since theory about writing is speculative, that’s all the more reason to communicate.

“This relationship between theory-talk and practice means that teaching writing is by necessity a cooperative enterprise, the ongoing cocreation of knowledge about writing. Students bring their own experience of practice, we bring ours, and we all negotiate theories of practice…Theory is communicable because our necessarily partial and tentative understanding of writing provides an impetus for theory-talk as a way of enriching that understanding” (173).

“Different perspectives on writing represent different attempts at describing our essentially incommunicable common experience of writing and teaching writing; no theory is ultimately superior to any other. It is the essaying that makes the conversation both interesting and worthwhile” (173).

Essentially, tying writing theory to axiology diminishes when we try to totalize theory. If we accept that it cannot be universalized and is always becoming, then communication and teaching as negotiation is absolutely important, possible, and necessary.

Question: Do you buy it?

Conclusion

“It is an act of faith that being does exist, that we can experience being, and that we can communicate about and through the experience of being. It is this act of faith that shields us from the unwarranted pride of certainty while keeping us from sliding into the despair of doubt” (174).

Question: Aside from my spiritual experience reading this text, what place does “faith”—as a foundation for academic legitimacy, not a metaphysical theology—assure us as a discipline? If, as Carter claims, there’s nothing linking teaching writing to improvements in writing, what does faith do for the existence of our discipline? I feel like he talked me off of the Vitanza cliff for 26 pages only to whisper in my ear once I’m safely in the backseat of a police cruiser, “If you believe.” And then the officer sped away and I looked out the back window at Michael Carter, and on his face was the Gorgian “impish” grin once again saying, “Nothing exists.”