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Writing with Risk: Dangerous Discourses and Event-Based Pedagogies Ben Harley University of South Carolina

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Writing with Risk: Dangerous Discourses and Event-Based Pedagogies Ben Harley University of South Carolina View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Scholar Commons - Institutional Repository of the University of South Carolina University of South Carolina Scholar Commons Theses and Dissertations 2018 Writing With Risk: Dangerous Discourses And Event-Based Pedagogies Ben Harley University of South Carolina Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarcommons.sc.edu/etd Part of the English Language and Literature Commons Recommended Citation Harley, B.(2018). Writing With Risk: Dangerous Discourses And Event-Based Pedagogies. (Doctoral dissertation). Retrieved from https://scholarcommons.sc.edu/etd/4729 This Open Access Dissertation is brought to you by Scholar Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Scholar Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. WRITING WITH RISK: DANGEROUS DISCOURSES AND EVENT- BASED PEDAGOGIES by Ben Harley Bachelor of Arts Benedictine University, 2010 Master of Arts University of Northern Colorado, 2013 Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements For the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English College of Arts and Sciences University of South Carolina 2018 Accepted by: Byron Hawk, Major Professor Mindy Fenske, Committee Member Pat J. Gehrke, Committee Member Laurie E. Gries, Committee Member Cheryl L. Addy, Vice Provost and Dean of the Graduate School © Copyright by Ben Harley, 2018 All Rights Reserved. ii DEDICATION To all the actors who rearticulate me—extra love to Mom, Dad, and Sandra. iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS As one who argues that agency is distributed among human and nonhuman actors enmeshed within a complex network, I know that the list of actors to whom I owe a debt of gratitude for writing this dissertation is far too long to list here. However, I would like to mention a few actors whose influence on this project has been particularly influential. First, I would like to thank my family. My parents have helped to encourage and support me without hesitation, even when they probably shouldn’t have. My brothers, sisters, nieces, and nephews have continually shown a keen interest in my work, reminding me that what I do has value beyond my field. Sandra’s grace, strength, and wisdom have been invaluable. Second, I would like to thank my mentors. Mindy Fenske challenged me to perform my arguments, which I continually strive to do. Pat Gehrke has been an enthusiastic and supportive adviser throughout this program. Laurie Gries has intellectually guided this project while also showing me great kindness. And Byron Hawk’s mentorship has been singularly valuable in a way I do not have space to express here. Third, I would like to thank the community at University of South Carolina, including the faculty, graduate students, and staff. I would like to extend a special thank you to members of RSA@USC, First-Year English, those who let me sleep on their couches when I was commuting, the students I was lucky enough to teach, and Laura Thorp. Finally, I would like to thank those actors who offered succor when I felt most harried including my bicycle, the Belgariad, coffee, Charleston Krav Maga, Dungeons and Dragons, my friends, phoenix, and a list of albums too long to list here. Thank you. iv ABSTRACT “Writing with Risk: Dangerous Discourses and Event-Based Pedagogies,” responds to the pedagogical work of scholars such as Susan Wells, Nancy Welch, and Linda Flower by arguing that the risks associated with public writing pedagogies stem from the transformative nature of the rhetorical event that implicates and rearticulates actors through co-production, subverting their assumed autonomy. I argue that each of the three primary vantages of publics scholarship is particularly vulnerable to a certain type of risk aligned to a specific element of the rhetorical situation: idealist scholarship to unintended consequences in which the meaning of the text transforms, activist scholarship to harassment in which the comportment of the audience transforms, and materialist scholarship to demagoguery in which the rhetors themselves transform. I explore each of the three risks through the case studies that compose Chapters Two, Three, and Four of this dissertation. First, I explain how the meaning of Black Power changed as it was interpreted and co-created by the Los Angeles street gang the Crips, which was then itself multiply interpreted and co-created by a variety of actors. Second, I present Gamergate as an example of how audiences can turn from innocuous to violent before explaining how the alt-right utilizes harassment to build their sphere public. Finally, I analyze the techno-utopian accelerationists to show how publics infatuated with their own terministic screens can move from narcissistic to demagogic. I end by advocating for event-based pedagogies that address these risks by attuning students to the co-productive and transformative nature of rhetoric. Event-based v pedagogies follow five tenets, asking students to: 1) enable other actors to participate in Life as such, 2) conduct nuanced research that illuminates the complexity of public discourse, 3) be open to the diverse array of opinions and perspectives expressed within and among various publics, 4) adapt positions and arguments in response to new information, and 5) attend to the ways in which new arguments are constructed from elements of prior arguments. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS Dedication .......................................................................................................................... iii Acknowledgements ............................................................................................................ iv Abstract ................................................................................................................................v Chapter 1: The Risks of Real Publics: The Potential Harms of Idealism, Activism, and Materialism ...................................1 Chapter 2: The Risks of Idealism: Mis-using Black Power and Mis-representing the Crips .........................................39 Chapter 3: The Risks of Activism: Gamergate Harassments and the Alt-Right Sphere Public .......................................84 Chapter 4: The Risks of Materialism: Narcissus and the Nascent Demagoguery of Accelerationism ...............................127 Chapter 5: The Risks of Events: Toward Event-Based Pedagogies ...........................................................................171 Works Cited .....................................................................................................................215 vii CHAPTER 1 THE RISKS OF REAL PUBLICS: THE POTENTIAL HARMS OF IDEALISM, ACTIVISM, AND MATERIALISM In his 2016 review essay “Publics and Intellectuals, both Real and Unreal,” Nathan Crick reviews four books that have been published in the field of Composition and Rhetoric in the last five years: Jay P. Childers The Evolving Citizen, Frank Farmer’s After the Public Turn, Anna M. Young’s Prophets, Gurus, and Pundits, and Samuel McCormick’s Letters to Power. Crick notes that each of these books argues that in some vital way the twenty-first-century public is failing to act as the authors believe it should. According to Crick, the authors are only able to make this argument because they have established a dichotomy between a real and an unreal world. Crick argues that Childers depicts a world in which young citizens no longer participate in the real public sphere of day-to-day local politics and instead focus on the unreal world of their own interests, Farmer depicts a world in which inauthentic and unreal normative politics hide the real authentic publics of marginalized groups, Young depicts the media and political class of this country as involved in creating an unreal politics for a citizenry whose only hope for being guided back to addressing their real concerns lies with public intellectuals, and McCormick depicts a real world in which academics exist in too complex a web of power to act as public intellectuals, asserting that anyone looking for academics to become opinion leaders is living in an unreal world. In making this critique, Crick identifies not simply a problem for these specific books but for Composition and Rhetoric 1 more generally: its tendency to create ideals from the complex, contingent, and material networks in which authors compose, texts circulate, and audiences interpret. Scholars of Composition and Rhetoric seem to believe that publics share a Platonic Form—a common ideal of which material publics are only imperfect representations. If only publics could be more rational, more community-centered, more authentic, and more intellectual, then they would be closer to this ideal. The problem with such an approach is that ideals are misinformed. Idealized spaces of discourse with transparent actors debating each other until the better argument wins out simply on its own merit—spaces in which participants do not tie their own interests, identities, and social positions to their arguments so closely that they are hurt when their positions are attacked—have never existed and could never exist. Such safe conceptions of the public sphere neglect to consider the material lives of public actors, which is why idealize publics have only ever existed in the abstractions of philosophers and glib readings of Jürgen Habermas’s The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. Real publics are material, complex, and filled with a myriad of
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