Saturday, November 28, 2015

Geoffrey Sirc—“Godless Writing”


Geoffrey Sirc—“Godless Writing”

Sirc compares Bataille’s attempt to break free of language while writing to his students’ struggles. Batailles tries to gain God through writing without religion.

I think Sirc’s extended metaphor here is religion. As Bataille tried to achieve God outside the dogma, so we prescribe religion instead of sacredness to our students. We give them ritual instead of worship. Or is it the other way around? “Composition substitutes the being and system of religion for the profound inarticulate nothingness of the sacred” (545).

“Composition’s theology posits a salvation, a world of successful writing for us and out students, a methodology to lead us out of despair to that world” (545).

We write from need, not satisfaction. “Composition needs to wreck itself in order to expose its fundamental need for need” (546). 

“Composition as I know it today sublimates the need for need in an artificial economy of the ‘real,’ a writing without torment, in which various effects must be pursued and satisfied in serious, meaningful effort” (546).

Composition is a salvation from a death that doesn’t exist. To be whole, real, composition should face the imperfect reality of communication.

Sirc compares the failure of composition’s economy of language to that of poetry. Poetry stresses the disintegration of language as an attempt to capture the excess. Composition holds to rules of concision as a dogmatic demand of communication. Its ends are only itself.

“We are caught in an entropic downward spiral about the ultimate usefulness, as a system of thought, of an anti-systematic on usefulness. The only way out is subversion, a fragmented openness to life and the sacred, a refusal to close a gesture on restricted intention, evading life” (548).

“This is not a writing that solves anything; it simply opens a rupture, crack the mirror so it can reflect the heart-braking reality of humanity. We sacrifice to feel our need to need, to reach a limit where words and reason cannot suffice. The sacred exists in decomposition; we kill our God to recapture a sense of the sacred” (549)
Question: Is this then the modern reinstitution of Truth to regain what was lost?

Composition never stops trying; it’s always about rules, conditions for that game, for the grasping. What sort of reality is that,then, that it deals with?

Communication isn’t the will to consensus, the grafting of realities into other minds. It’s the terminal exposing to another terminality his/her humanity. It is exposition.

“I must provide in my classes…a curriculum of heterodoxy” (552).

“There must be no profundity in teaching what amounts to mere contemplation; there must be moments of rupture, of unreasoned life” (552).

“Composition’s religion of salvation wants to end misery, not communicate it. It lacks an impulse, a communication of excessive pain, that can ‘ruin in [it] that which is opposed to ruin.’ Its religion is a hatred of chance. It never seeks to discover another language, merely to further dominate the utilitarian one” (552).

“Composition feels its religion of the word is enough, and ignores the unutterable sacred; a Bataillean pedagogy insists on a mystical experience at odds with discursivity” (556).

“Composition’s notion of ‘productive’ writing, in the way it has abandoned ideas of the university as a site of spiritual, intellectual inquiry and fallen under the sweep of this new trade-school idea of disciplinarity, rarely includes and notion of the body, which is the basis of the sacred. By installing a curriculum of writing that supports the contemporary project of technological advancement, complete with the same tired taboos of modernity, we profane ourselves, our bodies, and our world” (557).

“It is dualism’s realization that there are two worlds, not in an easy logic of contradiction, but in a tension of profound alteration…The one world does not cancel the other so much as irrupt into its identity, alter its totality” (560).

“Composition studies…are interested in clarifying the day, further articulating the day, bettering the day, never rupturing the day”

“We may not be able to teach risk, but it can be present in our courses. We can dare each other, be open to chance. We can sacrifice something; there can be moments of decomposition” (562).

Sirc ends saying he’s “ready to try teaching the unteachable.” In this, however, he’s not saying all composition is unteachable. The theology, the God, of composition is certainly teachable, but it has lost its sacred existential lifeblood that sustains itself on excess, laughter, torment. He’s ready to teach the writing that strives for the summit it knows is unattainable.

Friday, November 27, 2015

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.”












Saturday, November 14, 2015

James A. Berlin--Rhetoric and Reality: Writing Instruction in American Colleges, 1900-1985

"in this work...Berlin identifies three epistemological categories--objective, subjective, and transactional--that have dominated rhetorical theory and practice in the twentieth century" (ix).

His divisions are based on epistemologies, not ideologies. However, they inform certain ideologies.

  • Objective--behaviorist, semanticist, and linguistic
  • Subjective--Platonic idealism modified by Emerson and Thoreau 
  • Transactional--truth formed from rhetorical situation: classical, cognitive, epistemic (which Berlin favors)
Chapter One: An Overview

"It is for this reason [school has primarily sought language fluency] that rhetoric, the production of spoken and written texts, and poetic, the interpretation of texts, have been the indispensable foundation of schooling, regardless or the age or intellectual level of the student" (1).

"I will thus be concerned with the way in which writing instruction has been shaped by instruction in literature, and...the ways in which approaches to literary interpretation have been affected by methods of teaching the production of rhetorical texts" (1).

Rhetorical instruction has long been an institution of the college classroom. Many early (mid-19th century) classrooms used texts produced by the Common Sense rhetoricians--Blair, Campbell. "Instruction in rhetoric was in now way considered remedial, designed only for those who should have mastered it in the lower schools. It was instead regarded as a necessary concern of the college curriculum (2).

"the term rhetoric refers to a diverse discipline that historically has included a variety of incompatible systems...Each major system is destined to be replaced eventually" (3). We should, then, talk about "rhetorics, seeing the field as providing a variety equal to that of poetic" (3).

Each system purports to be THE system, which is indicative of the epistemic relationship between rhetoric and "assumptions about the very nature of the known, the knower, and the discourse community involved in considering the known" (3).

Theories of Rhetoric

Provides historical overview of the development of rhetoric during the 20th century.

Objective theories

Based on positivistic epistemology: the real is in the material world--reality must be empirically verifiable. Writers transcribe reality through a language of symbols. Ex: Current-Traditional rhetoric. "Disagreement has always to do with faulty observation, faulty language, or both, and neer is due to the problematic and contingent nature of truth" (11).

  • Current-traditional: Scottish Common Sense Realism; sensory perception/inductive reasoning can help perceive reality
  • observers are to maintain objectivity
  • truth exists in nature and language is a "distorting medium"
  • audience is outside the meaning-making act
  • truth--rational/logical discourse through writing; oration for passion and persuasion
  • Invention isn't taught because the writer is a scientific observer
  • Language is arbitrary; it should reproduce in the reader the observer's experience with energy and vivacity; should be correct in usage 
Objective rhetorics also include: behaviorist, semanticist, and linguistic theories

  • Behaviorist draws from behavioral psychology; Zoellner influenced by B.F. Skinner. Writing learning should be observable and conditioned with reinforcement
  • Semanticist: "focuses on the distortions that are introduced in communication through the misuse of language." It doesn't seek truth and meaning through language. It sees language as a transparent means of communication
  • Linguistic: "the empirical study  of the structure of language would serve as a model for the empirical investigation that is at the heart of rhetoric
 Subjective theories
  • truth located within the individual, distinct from empirically verifiable sensory world.
  • influenced by Plato, Emerson, and Thoreau
  • Influenced also by cognitive psychologists: Carl Rogers, Maslow
  • Platonic rhetoric: truth exists in immutable ideals that cannot be communicated; therefore, through the dialectic, two speakers point out falsities in each argument as a way to prepare themselves to experience truth
  • truth can be experienced by the individual but its transference to others is limited
  • the role of the teacher is to provide an environment for the students' self-discovery of truth and writing
  • observation within this paradigm is not a truth-telling or meaning-making exercise. It is, instead, a way for the observer to better understand how they construct meaning.
Transactional Theories
  •  truth from interaction of elements in the rhetorical situation (subject, object, audience, language)
  • Classical, cognitivist, and epistemic
  • Classical: truth located in social construction between interlocutor and audience; rhetorical truths are always open to debate; they are outside science; decisions made based on public discourse
  • Cognitivist: writers go through stages of development; the individual arrives at truth "through engaging the surrounding material and social environment" (16)
  • Epistemic: similar to rhetorical situation interaction in classical, but language is always seen as pervasive in the rhetorical situation; all experiences are grounded in language; rhetoric is thus a part of all human behavior; truth arises within discourse\
Chapter Two: The Nineteenth Century Background

Berlin starts this chapter with a brief overview of how writing instruction in American universities gave birth to the English department, which created literary studies, which subsumed writing instruction. Essentially, literature studies, a once non-existent field, overtook English and writing instruction.

As college and universities expanded their role in society to provide education to swelling student bodies, departments had to justify their existence, and the English department sought to identify itself, not with the Classical Greek and Latin texts, but with English and the English language as the unifying factor of language education.  

"The fall form grace of the college rhetoric course was thus the result of the convergence of a number of elements. The attempt to improve the status of English department members, the establishment of the study of English literature in the college curriculum, the shift in the language of learning in college, the new entrance exams in English, and even the establishment of the new public high school--all played a part in changing the nature of writing instruction in colleges" (24).

Rhetoric and poetic theory..."were at first thoroughly compatible...this relationship changed...as rhetoric became petrified in a positivistic configuration while poetic continued to develop and grow" 25). The two share a common epistemology.

Whereas literature in the English department quickly eschewed philological and historical approaches to their discipline, the rhetoric and writing discipline clung to positivistic, current-traditional theories.

"academic literary critics have divided discourse into two separate and unequal categories: the privileged poetic statement and the impoverished rhetorical statement, the one art and the other 'mere' science" (29). Rhetoric then is only language that is referential and logical, thus propelling the staying power of the current-traditional paradigm.

Chapter Three: The Growth of the Discipline

MLA est. 1883 solidified English studies within the university system

NCTE est 1911 reinforced commitment to students. Founded in opposition to the control college English curricula and requirements placed on high school students, of whom very few even went to college.

Between 1900-1920, there were 3 major approaches to teaching writing:
1. Current traditional--taught to help new professionals appear learned and scholarly in print (Harvard)
2. Rhetoric of liberal culture--writing instruction was exclusionary, aristocratic, and should only teach those who showed genius. The others should learn to write in high school. These school taught the beautiful letters (belletristic) (great literature). (Yale)
3. The rhetoric of public discourse--intended to help students engage in democratic process. (transactional)

The two major writing paradigms conflicted on the purpose of college instruction. Was it utility/pragmatics or was it edification?

The Ideas Approach

A transactional approach to writing, where "the student wrote essays about the traditional issues of rhetoric--legal, political, and social questions of a controversial nature--after reading essays that considered them...The ideas approach was an attempt to restore to rhetoric its concern with the probable, with arguing opposites in the realm of political action" (51).

The Efficiency Movement

1900-1920 education mimicked the scientific efficiency models of the business world.  The studies looked into how overworked comp instructors were. They decided workloads should be measured by the # of students the teacher had. 35 max for college comp. The students should also be taught by the best teachers, not the newest.

Graduate Education in Rhetoric

Though universities jettisoned rhetoric as a course of study for undergraduates in composition, graduate education in rhetoric survived.

The Great War

"But the fervor for English studies would not have been nearly as intense had it not been for the national threat posed from abroad. English courses--from elementary school to university--were seen as central to the effort to make the world safe for democracy and America safe for Americans" (57).

Chapter Four: The Influence of Progressive Education: 1920-1940

College enrollments surged and a subjective rhetoric that celebrated the individual emerged. Prevailing economic models heavily influenced the teaching of writing.

Progressive education: influenced by progressive politics. Tried to apply science to education while seeing the students as individuals who would form their own conclusions based on experience. The progressive institution  served society and tried to extend opportunities to all and maintain excellence.

Writing studies were empirically tested, and quantifiable mistakes were used to sort students based on perceived ability.

"progressivism contained within it two opposed conceptions of education--one psychological and individualistic and the other social and communal--which Dewey attempted to reconcile" (60).

"Taylor summarized the trends that he had identified in the survey. Placement tests were multiplying and ability sectioning was becoming widespread. At the same time, rhetoric textbooks were being abandoned while literature was increasingly being introduced into the course. Finally, English clinics were being established--places where students who had completed the freshman composition requirement could go for assistance with their college writing assignments" (64).

The Writing Program and Current-Traditional Rhetoric

"these current-traditional programs were including those features of progressive education that were compatible with their positivistic epistemology. Objective tests were strongly emphasized  in placing students and in evaluating student performance. The use of ability grouping and of the student-teacher conference was, furthermore, a clear response to progressive education's concern for individual differences...all of these features were compatible with the scientistic orientation of the course offerings. These freshman composition classes remained focused on problems of arrangement and style, with the content of discourse relegated to activity outside the composing process" (70).

Liberal Culture

Elitist paradigm. Cultivated genius. Writing learned through the study of literature.

Expressionist Rhetoric

"The ideal of liberal culture indirectly encouraged the development of expressionistic rhetoric through its philosophical idealism and its emphasis on the cultivation of the self, both derived from its ties to a Brahminical romanticism" (73). Consists of the "notion that each individual has uniquely creative potentialities and that a school in which children are encouraged freely to develop their potentialities is the best guarantee of a larger society truly devoted to human worth and excellence" (73-74). Writing seen as part of the Freudian unconscious. This paradigm values creativity. Writing is art. It can be learned but not taught. Creative writing courses flourished.

Social Rhetoric

Exemplifies a return to communal responsibility and a rejection of individualism. Resulted in 1) only writing that was currently being used by adults 2) a rhetoric of public discourse. In this paradigm, teachers should be writers that recognize isolated "themes" in the comp course do not provide realistic rhetorical situations and are instead assessed for correctness rather than effectiveness.


Conclusion

The 1930s saw two calls for abolishing freshman comp. 1) Comp created an underclass of professors who couldn't do the real business of the dept: Literature. 2) Writing was poor because students didn't have anything to say. Writing should, instead, be taught within a curricular context.

Chapter Five: The Communication Emphasis

The period from 1940-1960 saw a boom in general education emphases. Colleges "tried to combine the breadth of liberal learning with professional specialization" to "safeguard the American way of life" (92). Most general education curricula had a communications course, which "combined writing instruction with lessons in speaking, in reading and sometimes even in listening" (93).

Heavily influenced by the General Semantics movement, which is positivistic.

This brought about courses that focused on skills rather than content (belles lettres).

The post WWII college boom led colleges to supply ill-prepared students with "clinics." The clinics were heavily influenced by Rogerian psychology. An inability to write wasn't a deficiency; it was a psychic issue to be treated with therapy. This, however, was the extreme case of writing clinics found at the University of Denver. The student-centered approach at the University of Denver didn't last long, but it had a lasting influence on the possibilities of writing instruction.

Communications courses didn't reach a critical mass during the 40s and 50s. "Their decline, moreover, was inevitable. Criticism of them began in the early fifties and continued throughout the decade...Their fatal shortcoming in the end was the threat they posed to departmental autonomy and academic specialization" (104).

The birth of CCCC in 1949 indicated a shift toward recognizing composition as more than literature studies light or a way for junior faculty to earn a spot.

Many English departments in post WWII believed writing instruction should center on literary instruction. The study of literature reflected Cold War feelings about the importance of the individual. In their view, literary studies helped preserve democracy and build citizens.

Structural linguistics also influenced composition studies in the post WWII era.


The fifties saw a resurgence of rhetorical instruction.

Chapter Six: The Renaissance of Rhetoric 1960-1975


The continuing surge in student enrollment and the space race brought about the need for professionalized composition instruction. "these teachers began to promote graduate training for their discipline. By 1975, graduate programs in rhetoric and composition were forming, and rhetoric was becoming a respectable academic discipline" (121).


Jerome Bruner, a psychologist, influenced the development of process centered composition pedagogies. His concern, like Piaget's, was that students learned at strict developmental/cognitive levels.

"This chapter has examined the historical events surrounding the emergence of rhetoric as a discipline in the English department and has simultaneously considered the complementary professionalization of writing instruction. I have repeatedly mentioned the calls in the sixties and early seventies for a 'new rhetoric'...no dominant body of rhetorical theory emerged then or has emerged since to satisfy this request" (137).

Chapter Seven: Major Rhetorical Approaches: 1960-1975

 





A

Friday, November 13, 2015

Leland M. Griffin--"The Rhetoric of Historical Movements"

Readings on the Rhetoric of Social Protest, 2nd ed.

(1952)

"The recommendation has been made, for example, that we pay somewhat less attention to the single speaker and more to speakers--that we turn our attention from the individual 'great orator' and undertake research into such selected acts and atmospheres of public address as would permit the study of a multiplicity of speakers, speeches, audiences, and occasions" (10).

The essay seeks to set out some questions and answers for those who want to "undertake the rhetorical study of a movement" (10).

I

What should be the point of focus in the movement study?

A movement has occurred when 1. men have become dissatisfied 2) try to alter their environments for change and 3) the efforts result in success or failure.

"The student's task is to isolate the rhetorical movement within the matrix of the historical movement: the rhetorical movement is the focus...It is to be isolated, analyzed, evaluated, and described, so that he can say, for the particular historical movement which he investigates: this was the pattern of public discussion, the configuration of discourse, the physiognomy of persuasion, peculiar to the movement" (10).

II

What kind of movement should the student select for study, and how much of the movement should he study?

"As students of persuasion, interested not so much in the accomplished change of opinion as in the attempt to effectuate change, we should find the rhetorical structure of the lost cause as meaningful as that of the cause victorious" (10).

Griffin advises scholars here to look at the micro, and as the scholarship for  movements grow, the micro can be aggregated to reflect the macro.

III

How should the student go about the business of isolating and analyzing the rhetorical movement

Griffin divides movements into pro and anti:

pro movements hope to encourage the public to adopt some change
anti movements hope to encourage the public to reject or destroy an existing institution or idea

He then further divides the rhetors within those categories:

aggressors: establish (pro) destroy (anti)
defendants: resist reform (pro) defend institutions (anti)

He then breaks movements into 3 chronological stages:

1. inception--the movement is burgeoning, acts have just begun, just now noticed by the public
2. rhetorical crisis--balance between groups of rhetors is disturbed
3. consummation--movement ends because change has been reached or is ineffectual in its continuation

"such studies may demonstrate that the group which would assure itself of victory must necessarily generate a flood of persuasive argument and appeal, and employ all, or nearly all, of the available channels of propagation" (11). Griffin argues that movements must effect change and persuasion before the public turns against them.

"He will also note the development and employment of media of discourse. Assuming the movement selected occurred during the first half of the nineteenth century for example he will find the opposing groups using some or all of such channels of propagation" (12).

IV

What rhetorical criteria should the student use in evaluating the public address of the movement?

"A first and obvious principle is that the critic must judge the effectiveness of the discourse...in terms of the ends projected by the speakers and writers...the critic must judge the discourse in terms of the theories of rhetoric and public opinion indigenous to the times" (12).

V

How should the student go about the process of synthesis involved in reporting the movement?

"we should strive for movement studies which will preserve the idiom in which the movement was actually expressed...it will be so presented as to convey the quality of dynamism, the sense of action, chronologically" (13).

VI

"essentially the study's goal is to discover, in a wide sense of the term, the rhetorical pattern inherent in the movement selected for investigation 

Christine Harold--"Pranking Rhetoric: 'Culture Jamming' as Media Activism



Christine Harold (2004) Pranking rhetoric: “culture jamming” as media activism, Critical Studies in Media Communication, 21:3, 189-211, DOI: 10.1080/0739318042000212693


This essay explores the practice of “culture jamming” as a strategy of rhetorical protest. Specifically, “pranksters” deploy the tools of the mass media and marketing in order to take advantage of the resources and venues they afford. Through the concept of “pranking,” this essay suggests that the most promising forms of media activism may resist less through negation and opposition than by playfully appropriating commercial rhetoric both by folding it over on itself and exaggerating its tropes. 

 
 The article begins by highlighting a recent adbusters campaign aimed at mocking the Nike swoosh with a black dot. 

They're utilizing culture jamming, which "seeks to undermine the marketing rhetoric of multinational corporations, specifically through such practices as media hoaxing, corporate sabotage, billboard 'liberation,' and trademark infringement" (190).

"subvertizers" seek to undo marketing strategies.

Essentially, they use advertisement parodies to "culture jam."

"I suggest that while the advertising sabotage articulated by Adbusters is not without some rhetorical value, it does little to address the rhetoric of contemporary marketing—a mode of power that is quite happy to oblige subversive rhetoric and shocking imagery" (191). Marketers now actively try to sabotage age-old advertising tropes as a way to distance themselves from "dominant motifs."


"Further, I want to suggest that despite its deconstructive sensibility, parody, an example of what Mikhail Bakhtin (1984) would describe as turning the world upside down, perpetuates a commitment to rhetorical binaries—the hierarchical form it supposedly wants to upset" (191).

"Hence parody, as negative critique, is not up to the task of undermining the parodist’s own purchase on the Truth as it maintains both a hierarchy of language and the protestor’s role as revealer. Parody derides the content of what it sees as oppressive rhetoric, but fails to attend to its patterns" (191).



 
 
The essay then shifts to focus on pranksters, who "resists less through negating and opposing dominant rhetorics than by playfully and provocatively folding existing cultural forms in on themselves...in an effort to redirect the resources of commercial media toward new ends" (191).


"I conclude by suggesting that although pranking strategies do perform the Aristotelian notion of exploiting available means, for them to be fully imagined as rhetoric, rhetoric itself may have to be somewhat recalibrated in its role as a mass-mediated political art" (191-92).

Pranking shouldn't replace more traditional forms of protest rhetoric, but they should be seen as a viable option.

Jamming "usually implies an interruption, a sabotage, hoax, prank, banditry, or blockage of what are seen as the monolithic power structures governing cultural life" (192).


"it may be more useful to consider jamming as an artful proliferation of messages, a rhetorical process of intervention and invention, which challenges the ability of corporate discourses to make meaning in predictable ways" (192).


Considering parody as jamming, Harold writes: "This insistence on revealing a hidden truth also becomes a problem for other reasons. Such an insistence disallows a forceful response to what it faces because it can only react. It is a rhetoric that resentfully tells its audience “Things are not as they should be” without affirming possible alternatives" (192).

"Second, then, because the no-sayer has not challenged the essential form of the binary, one can never negate adequately by its own, dialectical standards. A rhetoric that is defined by negation must always encounter more boundaries that must be overcome. More transgression is always required, which inevitably produces more cynicism and resentment. Certainly, saying no is sometimes a crucial political strategy. However, I suggest that asceticism may not be an effective intervention into the scintillating world of consumer culture; and ironically, by ardently pursuing the authentic realm “out there,” one plays one’s role as consumer in the fullest possible sense, endlessly chasing after something just beyond reach" (192).


"That is, people are not denied access to information and knowledges but are granted ever greater access to them through the opening up of technologies and the hybridization of institutions. However, what might appear as new freedoms
also enable business to increasingly modulate every aspect of life. I suggest that the proliferation of the rhetoric of consumerism, in part, marks this shift from discipline to control. Because of this emerging shift from disciplinarity (which spotlights the political rhetoric of the nation-state) to control (which increasingly relies on the visual rhetoric of the market), the opportunities for political protest have shifted as well" (193-94). Essentially, Harold looks to Foucault's and Deleuze's archaeology of capitalistic transformation, which states that we've undergone a move to a consumer-service driven economy full of technology, effectually changing the nature and means of protest rhetoric.



"Media pranksters, an increasingly active type of consumer activist, prefer affirmation and appropriation to opposition and sabotage. Whereas the culture jammer as saboteur opposes commercialism through revelatory rhetoric such as parody, pranksters can be seen as comedians, as playful explorers of the commercial media landscape" (194).


"To reveal, one must stand in a familiar place and know just what is behind the spectacular curtain. In contrast, the comedian is something of a surfer with no firm, knowable ground on which to stand. Rather, she learns to navigate a force that is already in motion and will continue to be in motion long after she has passed" (194).


"Prank, in this sense, is an augmentation of dominant modes of communication that interrupts their conventional patterns. In the second alternative sense, a prank is a wrinkle, or a fold. Like a fold, a prank can render a qualitative change by turning and doubling a material or text. This qualitative change is produced not through the addition of novelty, but through reconfiguration of the object itself" (196).

 
"As we have seen, in its monkey-wrenching version, sabotage implies destruction or the stopping and hindering of flows through the introduction of an outside element. Put simply, it is a clogging. However, in the word’s second sense, as a launching tube, sabotage also implies a channeling, or a transmission of energy or resources through a conduit. This implies that resistance can also enable and direct energy flows rather than merely thwart them...sabotage is not a chaotic, shapeless, anarchic practice, but one that is restrained and shaped by the machinery from which it emerges; without the transmitting carrier, no thrust. In other words, constraints can be seen as immanent to those flows that seek to transform them" (197).

The "jamming" in this piece refers more to musical like jamming than it does to sabotage. Of course, the two connotation work well, but Harold seems more interested in appropriating a medium and inscribing over that canvas. 

Harold highlights a famous Barbie and G.I.Joe hack, wherein the pranksters bought the two talking dolls and switched their voices. Therefore, when children received the dolls for Xmas, the GI Joe spoke like Barbie and Barbie spoke like GI Joe, replete with hypernormalized gender roles. The group also included directions for parents to call local news media as well as instructions online about how others could perform the hack. The group behind the prank assumes and appropriates the corporate model of protection for the hackers.
As a private corporation, the group enables activists and investors to participate in illegal product tampering without much personal risk. As the group describes its mission: “ark is indeed just a corporation, and it benefits from corporate protections, but unlike other corporations, its ‘bottom line’ is to improve culture, rather than its own pocketbook; it seeks cultural profit, not financial” 

Concerning the Biotic Baking Brigade: 
"A pie in the face of Milton Friedman becomes what rhetoricians would call a synechdoche; it is an easy visual short hand for a whole host of grievances against globalization’s prevailing economic ideology.
The BBB’s Rahula Janowski explains the logic behind the group’s choice of “weapon”: “Pie is an example that you don’t have to revere someone just because they’re more powerful than you ... Pie is the great equalizer. How wealthy and powerful are you with pie dripping off your face?” Janowski points out that many CEOs and other powerful people do not often put themselves in situations where they hear dissent" (201).

"Unlike Adbusters, the BBB does not remain resentfully on the outside, denied access to what DeLuca and Peeples (2002) call the “public screen” by the commercial media. Instead, they hijack events that are already orchestrated for television—public speeches, rallies, meet-and-greets, and so on. They know that the image of a famous politician or captain of industry getting a pie in the face is so striking, the image-hungry media cannot help but cover it" (201).


"The BBB, then, mobilizes two familiar but dissonant visuals—a sober public speaker and a pie in the face—and by joining them, produces a kind of political jujitsu, using the power of the broadcast media toward its own ends" (202).


"Media pranksters like those in the BLO or the BBB just borrow that strategy, turning the media’s love of images over on itself, creating a venue for issues that the commercial media often ignore. Further, BBB agents, despite their somewhat militant politics, are always clean cut, articulate, and wear a sly smile. Hence, they are not easily dismissed as militant hippie radicals creating anarchy" (202).


"Anticipating terminology popular with contempor- ary culture jammers, he described the practice as “guerrilla media” warfare (p. 214). In this spirit, the Truth campaign, in effect, trains young people to practice their own brand of Situationism, by confiscating a small space from commercial advertising and using it as a site for rhetorical invention. The goal to reclaim public space from the increasing “contamination” of commercial messages is shared by many culture jammers—billboard liberators, graffiti artists, and hackers, for example—but these practices usually require a criminal act, defacing private property. The Truth bubble strategy is no different in that it is, in effect, encouraging young people to vandalize a corporation’s property. But, unlike other culture jammers who readily embrace their role as cultural guerrillas, Truth’s suggested hijack is noteworthy in that it comes from a government-regulated organization working with legally granted tobacco money" (206).


"The title of this essay, “pranking rhetoric,” was carefully chosen. On one hand, it names a category of rhetorical action: pranking. On the other, it articulates an underlying premise of this analysis. That is, in order to consider pranking as rhetoric, rhetoric itself must be, well, pranked. And, here, I mean prank in all its forms: to trick, but also to fold, and to adorn."
"As I have suggested, they do not necessarily rely on that “aha!” moment when an audience becomes conscious of some new insight. Also, their effectiveness does not depend on the ethos or charisma of a specific rhetor. Hence, they fall outside the expectations of what conventionally qualifies as effective rhetoric"


"In general, pranking has the potential to unravel rhetoric’s continued reliance on individual auteurs (be they presidents or protestors) because a prank’s source is often impossible to locate and, ultimately, irrelevant to its political impacts" (207).


"Contemporary commercial culture depends upon consumers having somewhat routinized responses to words and images; however, these re- sponses need not be completely homogenous. Indeed, it is the protean, polysemic nature of brands that allows them to be disseminated globally, across individuals and cultures (208).


"Pranking—as intensification, augmentation, folding—is conceptually and practi- cally quite different from how we often consider rhetorics of protest. Pranking is often comedic, but not in a satirical, derisive sense that prescribes a “correct” political position. It takes the logic of branding seriously" (208).


"It is important to note that the opportunities offered by culture jamming should not be seen as supplanting other, more traditional modes of engagement that continue to produce powerful rhetorical and political effects. Culture jamming— largely a response to consumerism and corporate power—may not be as productive in rhetorical situations that call for legal or policy interventions, for example. Further, culture jamming may be an effective strategy for engaging corporations who rely heavily on positive public relations, but may do little in the face of those which benefit from working beneath the public’s radar. For these reasons, it may be most helpful to take seriously culture jamming, and pranking in particular, as important components of rhetorical hybrids, collections of tools that activists and scholars can utilize when intervening in the complex world of commercial discourse" (209).