MIAMI UNIVERSITY The Graduate School
Certificate for Approving the Dissertation
We hereby approve the Dissertation
of
Dominic Micer
Candidate for the Degree: Doctor of Philosophy
______Director Cindy Lewiecki-Wilson
______Reader LuMing Mao
______Reader Laura Mandell
______Graduate School Representative Carolyn Haynes ABSTRACT
ANOTHER PHILOSOPHY, ANOTHER COMPOSITION
by Dominic Micer
This dissertation explores ontological issues, the real conditions of experience, and their relation to contemporary composition studies. Given the shifting terrain of contemporary socio-cultural practices concerned with issues of experience, affect, and labor, I explore alternative ways of thinking about and understanding these concerns. In order to develop this concern, I argue for a relational ontology that is normative rather than absolute and which speaks to the real conditions of experience and transforming the double binds that capture students, teachers, and institutions in oversimplified modern and postmodern ontologies. In Section One, I raise three concerns about the way students and composition scholars typically treat experience. I argue that composition studies would be best served by making relations, rather than student agency, the subject matter of composition. I then explore two attempts that try to develop the idea of experience and relations pointing out that these attempts need to go farther. In Section Two, I argue that a model of composition studies generated by an understanding of relations needs a different model of critique. Such a model of critique emphasizes the study of bodies and emotions and recognizes that the point of critique is to transform persons’ feelings about and sensibility of experience. I use what I call the Spinozist assemblage to reconstruct thinking about affect, experience, and bodies along radical monistic lines that develop the thought of difference. In Section Three, I turn to the issue of labor—particularly the work composition studies asks its students to do. I take the insight of composition scholars that what students produce by their labor are social relations and push this insight to a radical conclusion: I theorize writing as a kind of becoming—a symbiotic process whereby multiple bodies interact on affective, perceptual, and conceptual levels to think differently and beyond the boundaries of a simplistic ontology.
Another Philosophy, Another Composition
A Dissertation
Submitted to the Faculty of
Miami University in partial
fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
Department of English
by
Dominic Micer
Miami University
Oxford, Ohio
2004
Dissertation Director: Cindy Lewiecki-Wilson Acknowledgements Since one never does anything alone, I would like to acknowledge the multiple bodies that influenced and made possible the completion of this project. First, and without reservation, I thank my ever changing committee. The people who left: Bob Johnson, Susan Jarratt, Vicki Smith, Scott Shershow and others. But more so, I would like to thank Lu Ming Mao, and Laura Mandell for sticking through with the project as it developed. A very special thanks to Cindy Lewiecki-Wilson for pushing me to finish in a timely fashion and not allowing me to get bogged down in the dark soup of indecision. Without her, I may have never started finishing. Next, I would like to thank the colleagues whose never ending discussions about bodies and relations forced my hand to try to understand such things in new ways. This list should be endless, but cannot, and so I list only a few: Malea Powell, Scott Lyons, Jill Swiencicki. A special and enduring gratitude for Michael Mitchell, Michael Templeton, Susan Pelle, and Lisa Roulette who have re-taught me the value of friendship, taught me the value of collegiality, and unlearned me of the conditions of negativity that turn everything into its opposite. Without them, I never would have continued finishing. In addition, the host of faculty members that have consistently offered me encouragement and helped me get through and tolerate the process: Jennie Dautermann who made me feel smart when I really wasn't; Cheryl Johnson whose kind yet prodding words from time to time were helpful; and Mary Jean Corbett for making it all seem so real. The staff of the English Department deserves special consideration especially Trudi and Jackie. But I would be completely remiss if I did not thank my partner in smoking, and the person who pushed me in all the right directions, and helped me with dotting my t's and crossing my i's, Debbie Morner. She made the last two or three years beyond my allotted time fun. Without her, I never would have finished my thoughts about finishing. Last, I need to thank my family who have supported me in ways too numerous to count. I thank my father, mother, grand-parents, sisters and brothers. I thank Derek and Katy for reminding me consistently that not only am I not God, I'm not even the chairman of the board. But at the end of the day, I thank Sherry: no matter how far I descended into the depths of despair she pulled me back, no matter what the level of the depression she lightened me, no matter how successful or arrogant I became she humbled me; without her, I never would have finished at all.
ii
Table of Contents Section 1: Experience 1
Chapter 1: Lessons from an Ontological Illusion 2
Chapter 2: The Pedagogical Imperative and the Subjects of Composition 17
Chapter 3: Rethinking Experience and Relations in Composition 28
Section 2: Affect 36
Chapter 4: Critical Conditions: The Point of Critique 37
Setting the Stage 37
Nobody Likes Being Made an Example Of 39
Leading By Example, With Your Chin 43
Missing the Point 46
The Counter-tradition in Composition: The Production of Dissensus 50
Situating Affect 59
Critical Affirmation and the Point of Critique 62
Chapter 5: The Spinozist Assemblage: From Ethos to Ethology 66
Ethos and Haunting 67
Spinozist Interventions: From Counter-Modern to Anti-Modern 70
Feminist Supplements: From Ethos to Ethology 80
Section 3: Labor 85
Chapter 6: Affective Labor: Returning to the Subject of Composition 86
Chapter 7: Affect, Value, and the Work of Becoming 93
Real Subsumption: Affect Becomes the Measure of Value 93
Rethinking Standpoints: Irony and Self-Valorization 97
iii Becoming, Writing, and Affirmative Critique 103
Chapter 8: Becoming and Writing: Some Examples 109
On Experimental Writing 109
Hypertext and the Event of Capture 112
Experimental Becoming in a First-Year Composition Class 121
Appendix A: Web Assignment 127
Appendix B: "Samuel Taylor Coleridge's 'Work Without Hope'" by Jon Sonnheim 129
Appendix C: "S. T. Coleridge" by Melina Vissat 142
Appendix D: "The History of Jen Kay as a Scholar" and "Malcolm X Speaks to Me" 153
Appendix E: Glossary of Selected Terms 158
Works Cited 161
iv Section One: Experience
1 Chapter One
Lessons From an Ontological Illusion
Regardless of its name, what we now refer to as philosophical ontology has sought the definitive and exhaustive classification of entities in all spheres of being. It can thus be conceived as a kind of generalized chemistry. The taxonomies which result from philosophical ontology have been intended to be definitive in the sense that they could serve as answers to such questions as: What classes of entities are needed for a complete description and explanation of all the goings-on in the universe? Or: What classes of entities are needed to give an account of what makes true all truths? They have been designed to be exhaustive in the sense that all types of entities should be included, including also the types of relations by which entities are tied together. (Smith and Welty 1, emphasis in original)
A philosophy's ontology is the set of entities it is committed to assert actually exist, or the types of entities that according to that philosophy populate reality. (Delanda, “Deleuzean Ontology” 1)
Three domains of genealogy are possible. First, a historical ontology of ourselves in relation to truth through which we constitute ourselves as subjects of knowledge; second, a historical ontology of ourselves in relation to a field of power through which we constitute ourselves as subjects acting on others; third, a historical ontology in relation to ethics through which we constitute ourselves as moral agents. (Foucault, Ethics 262)
Onta, the really existing things; ontology, the study of the fundamental logic of reality apart from experiences. These determinations are both too restrictive and too total....For example, the logos in ontology already suggests a fundamental logic, principle or design of being. But it can and has been urged that the most fundamental thing about being is that it contains no such overriding logic or design. Ontopolitical interpretation may come closer, then. Onto because every political interpretation invokes a set of fundaments about necessities and possibilities of human being, about, for instance the forms into which humans may be composed and the possible relations humans can establish with nature. (Connolly, Ethos of Pluralization 1)
The minimal real unit is not the word, the idea, the concept or the signifier, but the assemblage. (Deleuze and Parnet, Dialogues 51)
To teach writing is to argue for a version of reality and the best way of knowing and communicating it—to deal…in the metarhetorical realm of epistemology and linguistics. And all composition teachers are ineluctably operating in this realm, whether or not they consciously choose to do so. (Berlin, “Contemporary” 766)
In twelve years of teaching college composition, I have never taught the same course twice. This rather unpeculiar approach to teaching composition is the result of what is becoming a long apprenticeship in college writing and in life. My endeavor, if I were to locate a cause for
2 it, more than likely, comes from my inability to recognize or identify with the many competing “versions of reality” currently existing in composition studies. While there are many valuable versions of reality one could choose from, highlighted, for example, in texts from James A. Berlin, Lester C. Faigley, Stephen North, and C. H. Knoblauch in the eighties and the nineties, they are mostly guided by a mistrust of ontological concerns—that is, concerns about versions of reality. Of course, ontology is a vexed concept. Officially, that is in terms of traditional philosophy, ontology is concerned with accounts of what there is, with the basic components of reality. Traditionally, ontology as first philosophy was concerned with providing principles that helped to explain existence. These principles have led to some of the most dangerous ideas Western culture has come up with: based on an account of “what there is,” for example, a dualism of material and ideal arose and developed into a whole number of further principles about what is good and what is bad. Most of the hierarchical dualisms that organize Western culture can be traced to this fundamental first dualism: what is “natural” must be overcome; the body, because it is material, must be subservient to the mind; emotion, because it is bodily, must be subservient to rationality; women, because they are identified by emotion and thus their bodies, must be subservient to men, and so forth. For example, Sharon Crowley, in The Methodical Memory, argues that traditional philosophy, as first philosophy or ontology, has turned rhetoric, at least in its dominant form of pedagogy in contemporary composition courses, into current-traditional rhetoric. She says it does this in three ways: First, a philosophical approach will assume the ontological priority of individuals to communities and an actual correspondence between what effects individuals and what effects communities; second, it will assume that philosophy is more concerned with logic and reason, or the mind, than it is with “passions and the will”; third, because philosophers are interested in discovering “first principles that lie outside of language” they tend to see language as an “instrument” or “tool,” the usefulness of which “lies in the accuracy of its representative powers” (166-7). The chief result of such philosophizing, in terms of the creation of current-traditional rhetoric, is an emphasis on arrangement and style over invention. With such philosophizing, invention becomes a lost art. In addition to Crowley, the work of C. H. Knoblauch clearly aligns ontological concerns with the concerns of “current-traditional” rhetoric, and as a type of thinking to be resisted. In his article, “Rhetorical Constructions: Dialogue and Commitment,” one of the lesser known articles about framing composition strategies within groupings that have defined our view of the profession, Knoblauch presents the ontological as “articulat[ing] and defend[ing] a conservative reality, emphasizing permanence, certainty, and tradition, the maintenance of a status quo, politically as well as intellectually, which no defiant utterance, no provocative metaphor, no discovery of ‘new’ knowledge, is entitled to reconceive” (129). For Knoblauch, this conservatism is directly attached to the practices of current-traditional rhetoric: The ontological statement, well represented in the major texts of classical rhetoric, expresses the most successfully maintained view of language and language teaching that the west has so far produced. Mediated by the conditions of current American life, it is called upon to ratify some of our most cherished educational values, including the importance of ‘literacy’ to personal prestige, intellectual capacity, and civic responsibility, as well as the proper concern of schools to socialize the young by promoting normative political, ethical, aesthetic, and other cultural behaviors. It has also articulated some of our most venerable teaching beliefs, the emphasis on verbal skill and decorum, the need to learn control of the techniques of argument and of style, the need to
3 master the ‘basics’ of grammar first…and other precepts later. (128) Clearly, Knoblauch construes ontology as a kind of naïve or direct realism. “Philosophically,” Knoblauch adds “the ontological argument presumes an absolute distinction between the concept of ‘language’ and the concept of ‘reality,’ the second prior to the first and denoting an intrinsically coherent ‘world’ (that is, metaphysical order) to which language ‘makes reference’ so as to enable human communication” (128). The overall problem of this kind of ontological position, for Knoblauch, is that the “knowledge to which language refers is not, in its fundamentals, subject to growth or change” (129). He further explains: Such metaphysical constructs as ‘being’ and ‘becoming,’ ‘causality’ or ‘substance’ and ‘accident,’ such ethical constructs as ‘good’ and ‘evil,’ or the ‘mean between extremes,’ such political constructs as hierarchical class structure based on intrinsic or God-given merit, are essentially static, ‘underlying,’ and giving meaning to the flux of the flux of the phenomenal world. (129) If this defines the conditions of all ontological perspectives, then composition would be surely derelict in its duty if it did not banish such practices from its field of purview. As stated, I have two concerns with Knoblauch’s presentation of the ontological. First, and foremost, Knoblauch seems to have no concerns that this ontological position is often the position our students enter into our classrooms deeply committed to. Second, Knoblauch does not mention that his other forms of contemporary composition practice—the objectivist, the expressionist, and the sociological, or dialogical—also have ontological commitments of their own. In addition, there is a curious lack of recognition that ontological positions can themselves change. Knoblauch, and Crowley for that matter, seem to think any ontological position must set itself up by first separating language and the real. This, as has been shown by many contemporary thinkers, does not have to be the case. In fact, one could argue that the practices valorized by Knoblauch are undone by his very reticence in tracing his epistemological concerns to their ontological presuppositions. In his article, “New Challenges to Epistemic Rhetoric,” Daniel J. Royer explores just that concern. Royer examines the philosophical assumptions behind Knoblauch’s version of “epistemic” rhetoric through their origins to philosophical thinkers like Ernst Cassirer, Susanne K. Langer, and Immanuel Kant. Royer argues that thinkers in the epistemic tradition are influenced by Cassirer’s reduction of the Kantian distinction between the “noumenal” and the “phenomenal” to a “subjective idealism.” First, Royer locates the two major influences Kant has had on modern philosophy. The first influence, Royer maintains, is “epistemological” and has to do with how “people are not passive receptors of sense data, but rather active participants in the formation of knowledge” (284). The second influence, Royer maintains, is “metaphysical” whereby “Kant perpetuates the Cartesian notion of two realities: mind and matter, or as Kant more technically called them, ‘noumenal’ and ‘phenomenal’” (285). Royer quotes from Kant’s Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics to show this dualism: Since the oldest day of philosophy, inquirers into pure reason have thought that, besides the things of sense, or appearances (phenomena), which make up the sensible world, there were certain beings of the understanding (noumena), which should constitute an intelligible world….And we indeed, rightly considering objects of sense as mere appearances, confess thereby that they are based upon a thing in itself, though we know not this thing as it is in itself but only know its appearances, viz., the way in which our senses are affected by this unknown something. (285) For Royer there is a value in the epistemic recognition of persons being the active producers of
4 knowledge. However, by failing to examine the “subjective” and metaphysical presuppositions that organize their position, followers of epistemic rhetoric eventually reduce the alternatives of their underlying dualism “to one of two extremes: the purely objective views or purely subjective views” (293). In an endeavor to preclude these reductions, Royer argues in favor of an understanding of “new realists” that argue for “a movement beyond ‘objectivism and relativism’”: New Realism has provided [a] philosophical alternative. Though there are a variety of models that merit an unprejudiced reading, they all insist on some kind of unity between the objective and the subjective, between appearance and reality. In this way they avoid the problems associated with dualism. Though they insist there is a reliable core of objective knowledge, they temper this claim by recognizing all human knowledge is fallible. (293-4) In the philosophical realm, Royer finds “new realist” models in the work of Alfred North Whitehead and Sean Sayers. In the field of rhetoric he highlights the work of James Hikins, Richard Cherwitz, and Kenneth Zagacki. While I find Royer’s critique of Knoblauch interesting and useful for pointing out the underlying metaphysical dualism of the epistemic model of composition, I’m not convinced that his description of unity is thoroughly nuanced enough to deal with what I will call the real conditions of the actual problem. Royer, I think correctly, identifies the problem when he states “[e]pistemic rhetoric…conceived as meaning that language is involved in the structuring of knowledge, is here to stay. What is, and may remain controversial for a long time, concerns the whole web of how it is and when it is that communication creates knowledge and the status of that knowledge” (295). That is to say, epistemic positions, because of their reductions of dualistic positions, miss the important point of how communication functions as a kind of reality. That is, they miss the ontological nature of language itself by reducing it to a kind of “subjective idealism.” While that is important to recognize, I find it problematic that Royer presupposes a “common sense” understanding of the real as the condition of possibility for experience. Royer borrows from Hikins and Zagacki the idea of necessarily recognizing that if we are going to hold onto and find useful “concepts such as rhetors, audiences, messages, and objects of discourse, an adequate epistemology must systematically explain the way each of these elements of reality interact” (291). From this he concludes, “[d]ualist explanations have failed to account for the objective reality that common sense insists must be knowable by human consciousness” (291). Royer doesn’t complicate common sense enough. If we were concerned with the basic common sense understanding of reality that suggests to us that dropping a fifty-pound weight on our foot will hurt, then I can see his point. On the other hand, Royer’s imposition of common sense does not explain the very conditions of experience that make possible common sense. Therefore, while Royer is right to point out that epistemic rhetoric ignores its own ontological dualism by reducing dualism to a “subjective idealism,” he perpetuates his own ontological illusion by grounding the real in a common sense projection of the mental onto the material. He misses Whitehead’s point about the problems of dualism which he quotes: “In between [a dualism between matter and mind] there lie the concepts of life, organism, function, instantaneous reality, interaction, order of nature, which collectively form the Achilles heel of the whole [dualistic] system” (quoted in Royer, 291). Such features of “interaction” cannot be resolved through recourse to some foundational common sense. To conclude, Royer, while acknowledging the possibility of an alternative ontology, which Knoblauch and Crowley are loathe to consider, because he relies on a formal common sense as the ground for understanding experience, fails to examine the
5 ontological capacity of that common sense, or better, fails to determine the conditions by which such common sense is formed. My concern about ontology has developed along with my concern for students, a concern about students’ relationship to language that I realized as long ago as my first year of teaching back in 1991 at a state university in New England happy about its inclusion in the book The Public Ivies. What I realized in that first course I ever taught is that students’ attention to learning—both in terms of resistances and affirmations—is wrapped up in the ontological commitments they’ve forged in their growth and development. By ontological commitment I mean the set of fundamental elements derived from experience that constitute a person’s capacity for interacting with the world. While social epistemic rhetoric has turned to concepts of ideology and discourse as a means to explain such commitments, I will try to push those analyses of the problematic of experience to their ultimate limit by arguing from an immanent ontology that recognizes the thorough materiality of the world and bodies in interaction. This is to say that I am interested in reconfiguring the problematic of experience from the perspective of an immanent ontology that makes no room for dualisms of any kind. That course at New England Public Ivy1 focused on the writing process with an aim towards using invention strategies like journaling and free writing, using multiple drafts to emphasize revision as content change, and preparing first-year writers for the kinds of writing they would do later in college. One of the stock exercises we used was a compendium of overused, trite, and hackneyed sentences culled from student texts and put together by a fellow graduate student in the form of a personal narrative. It was kind of reminiscent of the history paper a high school instructor puts together and that shows up from time to time in a column in the newspaper like Ann Landers, or one you might now get as one of those joke e-mailings where the lists of names it’s sent to is longer than the file itself. You’ve seen this before; it has sentences like “Napoleon was a dessert who was devoured by the Beef Wellington” and “George Washington crossed the Delaware to get to the other side.” In the version I used back at New England Public Ivy, the title was “Words Cannot Describe,” and the first sentence read “Words cannot describe the feeling I felt at that moment in time.” Now the function of the history paper described above is two-fold: first, it is to make people laugh; second, it serves as a cautionary tale in the framing of the “dumbing down” of American students. Precisely who these kinds of compilations serve I’m going to leave an open question. In the case of “Words Cannot Describe,” I used to put it on an overhead and show it to classes during the revision process for three reasons: to get students to recognize when concrete words are necessary, to get students to recognize the pre-written character of much of their writing, and, of course, to make them laugh. Invariably, in spite of the fact that many of my fellow graduate students had success with this paper, it failed miserably in any of its objectives with my students. The reason it failed? They liked it; they thought it was good writing. Incredulous, I asked them what made it good writing. Because, they said, “anyone can relate to it,” and it leaves the reader to decide what is important. Despite my remonstrations, they would not budge in their beliefs about the quality of “Words Cannot Describe” and, finally, I gave up on it when I started finding rewrites of the sentences in their papers. At first, I thought my students were just being reactionary, resisting my position just for the sake of resistance. But then, after much time and thought, I began to realize that my students were trying to teach me a lesson. They were trying to teach me that the concrete expression is
1 I am adopting the terminology to represent universities that Lynn Z. Bloom uses in her book Composition Studies as Creative Art. 6 not always the most useful expression for a writer to make to a reader. Here I am reminded of Richard Ohmann’s characterization of Rule 12 from Strunk and White’s Elements of Style (which incidentally was the style book that went along with the textbook for that class): “Use Definite Specific Concrete Language.” In that article, Ohmann recognizes the ideology of style hiding beneath this widely used imperative as demonstrated in textbooks. He writes: the injunctions to use detail, be specific, be concrete, as applied in these books, push the student writer always toward the language that most nearly reproduces the immediate experience and away from the language that might be used to understand it, transform it, and relate it to everything else. The authors privilege a kind of revising and expanding that leaves the words themselves unexamined and untransformed. (250) Now certainly my students’ attitudes, interpreted kindly, can reveal the significance of Ohmann’s point in the first sentence of the citation above. In general, as readers and writers, they sense they can do more with a sentence of the type “Words Cannot Describe”; however, they are also, at the same time, doing what Ohmann deplores in the second sentence: They are “leaving the words...unexamined and untransformed.” But, I would argue, that is precisely the intent of the essay “Words Cannot Describe,” to leave the feeling in question unexamined, untransformed because the feeling appears to be unexplainable outside the immediacy of the limited context in which it appeared—so much so that words cannot describe it. I say “appears to be unexplainable” for two reasons: first, I think that the sentence points to students’ implicit knowledge that the pre-written character of the words they choose will not do justice to the feeling of the experience; and second, students have been educated to believe that the affective and emotional are personal and private, and thus idiosyncratic, especially in writing. In sum, students see the feelings they have as pre-given and private, so to get across the authenticity or reality of the experience it is best to leave the experience indefinite, unspecified, and abstract because everyone knows the experience of being unable to describe a feeling. Their point to me: it is more useful and liberating to leave feelings and things unrelated to concrete words because, like the song popular at the time by Gloria Estefan reveals, “Words Get in the Way.” This lesson, I feel, is an important lesson. It reminds composition teachers, and particularly composition teachers informed by critical pedagogy, that while we recognize the material effect of words to be constitutive of knowledge, and some would also go as far as to say that the materiality of words constitute versions of reality, our students resist this because the experience is always more powerful than the representation of the experience in language. This is to say, on the one hand, experience is always productive of an excess that challenges a person’s experience. And it is to say, on the other hand, that that the experience, as a feature of the student’s inward mental life, is more powerful than the experience as recorded in the words of language—by principle thought to be external to that student’s life. For these particular students, and for many more, the power of the internalized experience cannot be explained by any concrete external words precisely because the experience belongs to them and belongs to them alone. What this process of internalization of experience points to is our first example of an ontological illusion which governs our students’, and indeed our own, understanding of reality. In a fascinating lecture titled “The Inwardness of Mental Life,” Stephen Toulmin (of claims, supports, and warrants fame) argues that the divide between the inside and outside, the internal and the external, the private and the public, the mental and the material, the moral and the physical is an error in thinking begat by what he calls “a feeling of entrapment,” as partly the result of an “ontological illusion: a consequence of confusing the ‘interiority’ of neurological
7 processes with the ‘inwardness’ of mental experience” ("Inwardness"). As Toulmin puts it, the ontological illusion forces us to create a gap between the inside and the outside, thought and the real: “Instead of respecting the complexities of our actual experience, [the ontological illusion] exhorts us to run all these contrasts together into a single, comprehensive dichotomy: between the ‘inner’ mental world of moral sensibility and good intentions, and the ‘outer’ material world of physical objects and brute forces” ("Inwardness"). In short, regardless of the contemporary protestations against Cartesian mind/body and thought/extension dualism, and the protestations by many thinkers against objectivist ontology, the practice of living reinforces such dualisms consistently. The most interesting part of Toulmin’s discussion, however, is not that such ontological illusions occur; for Toulmin, they are interesting because while it may be an “error,” it is not an “accident.” That is to say, there are practical reasons for people to hold on to such illusions, practical reasons which derive not from concerns “internal to individual minds,” but “outside them…in the public and external world of social, moral, and political interactions” ("Inwardness"): The development of an active ‘inner life’ is our own work; but, less directly, it depends on the kind of support we have from others. If the larger world of social and moral relations proves strong and reliable, we are able to move freely between our personal inwardness and public openness. In that case, our inner lives can be not just active, but also effective: internalization serves as an instrument of autonomy, so there can be no sense of discontinuity between the ‘inner’ and the ‘outer.’ If the public moral world proves fragile and untrustworthy, on the other hand, internalization may serve rather as a mechanism of defense. The inner life of the mind is then less a base for effective outside action than a refuge of asylum from the public world: and the problem of transcending solipsism in that case becomes, not just an intellectual problem, but an emotional one. In passing to and fro between the private world of inner experience—which is seemingly protected against intrusion by external agencies—and the public world of space and time—from which nothing good can apparently be expected—we shall then experience a clear discontinuity. ("Inwardness") I would argue that part of the goal of critical pedagogy is to point out the fragility and untrustworthiness of the public moral world. When we do that, regardless of our intentions, we are in fact reproducing this ontological split between the internal and the external. Unlike Toulmin, I do not see this as a negative. Rather it is a problem that needs to be addressed. In education theory, for example, Jennifer Gore’s The Struggle for Pedagogies brought to the forefront of contemporary pedagogy the inherent problems in any “intentional” liberatory pedagogy or pedagogy of empowerment. Gore found that “discourses of radical pedagogy can be seen to have at least two pedagogies: (1) the pedagogy argued for (the claims made about the process of knowledge production in radical pedagogy) and (2) the pedagogy of the argument (the process of knowledge production evident in the argument itself)” (Struggle 5). Gore’s work forced many to recognize that trying to empower students often ends with conflicting results. In examining pedagogies of empowerment, Gore pointed out that power couldn’t be given; it is not a thing, but a relation that organizes itself in different contexts in very contingent ways. Many in critical pedagogy took Gore’s work as a cautionary tale about pedagogies of empowerment; for me, however, it pointed out the necessity of the classroom as a site to surface competing versions of reality at the ontological level. Gore quotes twentieth century French philosopher Michel Foucault to solidify this point: “the longer I continue [Foucault writes], the more it seems to me
8 that the formation of discourse and the genealogy of knowledge need to be analyzed, not in terms of consciousness, modes of perception, and forms of ideology, but in terms of tactics and strategies of power” (quoted in Gore 77). This is to say that we need to analyze the “microprocess[es] of social life, as an all pervading phenomenon which emerges everywhere out of the infinitesimal violences of concrete, local transactions” (Knorr-Cetina 22), and I would add not just “social life,” which implies a clear distinction between nature and culture, but the microprocesses of life itself. What can happen in such classrooms is the production of a classic double bind for our students by forcing them into a productive, antagonistic encounter with the ontological illusions they project on to experience in order to constrain and enable life itself. The creation of a double bind for students, I would argue, is not the imposition of a false account of experience. Rather it is a way to surface the ontological illusions that always already guide their attention to experience. To that end, when I had the chance to construct my own composition course, I began to try to figure out ways I could create encounters productive of double binds. Before I continue, I think it is important to clarify the term double bind. The double bind as a phenomenon was first articulated by Gregory Bateson in his work on schizophrenia and his work on Balinese culture. Jeffrey Bell usefully summarizes Bateson’s construction of the double bind: a double bind consists of two injunctions. The first or primary injunction says that one must or must not do so and so; the second injunction is more general, or more ‘abstract,’ and conflicts with the first. For example, a mother might tell a son not to do so and so, but then might, by her more general behavior—i. e., gestures, intonation, or other non- verbal means of communication—tell him not to submit to her prohibitions. Regardless what the son does, therefore, he will be in the wrong. (376) Bell continues to show that, for Bateson, the endeavor to reduce the double bind through an effort to find out what the “person ‘really’ means often fails” and the resulting failures organize persons into a series of pathologies. Bell lists: Paranoia, when the person assumes what is really meant is harmful to [them]; hebephrenia, when the person gives up attempting to distinguish between levels of meaning and hence either takes everything literally or takes nothing seriously; catatonia, when the person detaches from external communication and withdraws into internal processes; and even schizophrenia, where hallucinations and delusions are created to resolve the double bind. (377) At first glance the problem of the double bind as constructed might seem to not lead to anything productive. Bell, however, is quick to point out that Bateson thinks that in the same way that schizophrenic responses lead to “creating hallucinations and delusions” this same creativity could be used “to resist pathological consequences” (377). That is to say, the double bind need not turn into paranoia, hebephrenia, catatonia, or schizophrenia; “it can also be circumvented with the creation of new forms of communication, new conventions, that can re-open the lines of communication” (Bell 377). It was with this recognition that I began to rethink my teaching practices. I started with a teaching-the-conflicts approach around the topic of nature versus nurture because, in my readings of student papers, while students were fully willing to think about how language constructs their understanding of things, they also understood their ideas and conceptualizations of experience in terms of how their brains worked. As current educational research has created useful theories of multiple intelligences, and so forth, students internalize
9 these characteristics as examples of how their brains function. Thus teachers might hear students report, “I’m not really a creative thinker; I’m more of an analytical thinker.” In order to intervene into this process, I turned to Edward M. Hundert’s book Lessons From an Optical Illusion. Hundert takes a Hegelian dialectical approach to the issue of nature vs. nurture, one that reconciles each pole into a synthesis, and argues that both act equally in the construction of thought. Hundert takes recent neurobiological research on the phenomenon of brain plasticity and marries it to traditional rationalist philosophy in an endeavor to carve out a space between what Royer labeled “objectivism and relativism.” While I saw Lessons From an Optical Illusion as a necessary introduction to an important conflict that engages all disciplines, the students resisted, consistently asking again and again, “What does this have to do with writing?” I tried to explain to them that how they conceptualize writing and thinking is just as important, and indeed, is a necessary correlate to the kind of writing they produce. The students never bought my explanation. Partly influenced by the demands other instructors were putting on them in terms of grammatical correctness, and partly influenced by their belief in the predetermined capacity of the brain and neurological processes, students felt that thinking about writing would never improve their ability to write. However, the book was not a total failure. The students seemed genuinely interested in Hundert’s chapter that corresponds to the title of the book “Lessons from an Optical Illusion.” But their interest wasn’t because of the argument Hundert makes in that chapter about how people can intervene into their own thinking about perception. They were fascinated by the fact that Hundert could develop so many points from one simple perceptual illusion. They were interested in how one figure, as if by magic, could generate a proliferation of concrete and productive statements. They were interested in a kind of symbolic analysis, which as Robert Reich in the Work of Nations suggests is the kind of work for which educational institutions prepare their students. In Reich’s words “[t]he symbolic analyst wields equations, formulae, analogies, models, constructs, categories, and metaphors in order to create possibilities for reinterpreting, and then rearranging, the chaos of data that are already swirling around us. Huge gobs of disorganized information can thus be integrated and assimilated to reveal new solutions, problems, and choices” (229). Students grabbed on to this insight in all of its complexity, because it allowed them to see themselves as active agents directly productive of value. To be more precise, Hundert’s discussion of the ontological illusion, and the students’ recognition of its value, and perhaps mine as well, is partly a result of how the process resembles the notion of capital accumulation, which is to say that the illusion creates a kind of surplus value that can be then turned into more value. This is an issue I will take up in more detail in Part Three when I examine the issue of labor, but for the moment I would like to point out that in a capitalist economy the ontological illusion takes on the character of translating2 all information and knowledge into commodities whereby the individual student takes the position of value by internalizing it as a feature of their own capacities. In this sense, the ontological illusion works in the same manner as Toulmin describes above: if one perceives one’s value as continuous with the external world it produces a satisfying relationship; however, if one construes their value as discontinuous with the external world it is unsatisfactory. At the end of the day, and the end of the semester, I realized that I was merely reproducing with my students the capacity to understand what it takes to be a good capitalist.
2 At one point in Capital Marx terms this transformation of value “metempsychosis,” which describes a transformation of the material into the abstract or eternal, the model being the “translation” of Christ from human to Deity. 10 Now, however, I would push this one step further. I would argue now, and this is something I resisted for a long time, education is, regardless of the model you choose to use, always caught up in capitalist exchange, and the way to work through it is to work with it and against it at the same time. In the article, “The Labor of Learning,” Alexander J. Sidorkin argues that learning is inherently “an exploitative economic enterprise” because it is unpaid compulsory labor (92, 97). Sidorkin points out that the products students’ produce have no value in themselves, and thus are “useless” and so “learning is a by-product of making useless things” (94). As a result, “student labor is unique in that it deposits value not in its immediate product…but in the worker…or, more precisely, in [the worker’s labor power]” (96). What this means is that the things that students produce are “the means of production,” making the students capitalists, as they own their own means of production. Hence in the same way that Jennifer Gore argues that the reasoning that attempts to integrate students into a community of radical teachers fails because it relies on the very rationality that it seeks to undermine, my endeavor to challenge students to think differently, at the same time, makes that differential thinking subservient to the rationality of capital. With this realization came another attempt to think differently, one that I thought would directly confront the ontological illusions that faced my students and me. At the same time, I felt that what was missing was a clearer approach to language itself, and so I decided to go to the one commonality that all of these approaches had in common: metaphor in general, and conceptual metaphor in particular. For my next course, the textbook became, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s classic introduction to conceptual metaphor Metaphors We Live By. Generated by Lakoff and Johnson’s discussion of “the conduit metaphor,” which they argue is the dominant conceptualization of communication in contemporary society, my interest became getting students to awareness of the nature/nurture divide from the bottom up, through analyzing common constructions of everyday speech which inundate their papers and create over- generalized and over-simplified categories. Borrowing their discussion from the work of Michael Reddy, Lakoff and Johnson explain that the conduit metaphor is a complex metaphor that explains our predominant understanding of “language about language.” The conduit metaphor is made up of three distinct parts: IDEAS (OR MEANINGS ARE OBJECTS; LINGUISTIC EXPRESSIONS ARE CONTAINERS; COMMUNICATION IS SENDING (Lakoff and Johnson 10). This metaphor corresponds to the more general understanding that people have of communication. As Lakoff and Johnson state it, a “speaker puts ideas (objects) into words (containers) and sends them (along a conduit) to a hearer who takes the idea/objects out of the word/containers” (10)3. For Lakoff and Johnson, the most important revelation of the conduit metaphor is “the ways in which it masks aspects of the communicative process” (11). They elaborate: First, the LINGUISTIC EXPRESSIONS ARE CONTAINERS FOR MEANINGS aspect of the CONDUIT metaphor entails that words and sentences have meanings in themselves, independent of any context or speaker. The MEANINGS ARE OBJECTS part of the metaphor…entails that meanings have an existence independent of people and contexts. The part of the metaphor that says LINGUISTIC EXPRESSIONS ARE CONTAINERS FOR MEANING entails that words (and sentences) have meanings, again independent of contexts and speakers. (11) While I had always tried to get my students to experiment with text as a way to introduce their
3 In their work, Lakoff and Johnson always mark conceptual metaphors by capitalizing them. In my discussion of their work, I follow their precedent. 11 final portfolios, it occurred to me that if I could explain to them the features of the conduit metaphor and its control over how language is understood, it might enable them to experiment more freely with language. As a class we could experiment with alternative metaphors about how ideas, words, meanings and sentences could be conceptualized differently than in terms of container metaphors. But I agreed with Lakoff and Johnson; these kinds of metaphors “are appropriate in many situations, those where context differences don’t matter and where all the participants in the conversation understand the sentences in the same way” (11-12). For me, the matter became how do I prepare students for those kinds of situations, as well as make it possible for them to challenge these pre-conceptions? Interestingly enough, as I was pre-reading Lakoff and Johnson for this class, and figuring out what I might supplement the text with, I realized that Metaphors We Live By is not merely a discussion of conceptual metaphor. Implicit within the text is a rhetoric for the production of academic and expressive discourse; that is, included in the text are rich discussions of definition and argumentation as well as examples of potential research projects that could easily become models for students to follow. I thought I had hit the mother lode. I organized my course feeling very good about the whole project, not just in terms of what my students might learn, but also in terms of what I might learn. The course would revolve around Metaphors We Live By as our primary text, supplemented with a series of articles by Lakoff (“Anger” and “Metaphor, Morality and Politics”), Robert Reich’s chapters on symbolic analysts from The Work of Nations, Emily Martin’s now classic article “The Egg and the Sperm,” Deborah Tannen’s introduction and first chapter of her book The Argument Culture, Susan Griffin’s essay “Red Shoes,” E. B. White’s essay “Spring,” and Michelle Cliff’s essay “If I Could Write This in Fire, I Would Write This in Fire.” The writing assignments included a five paragraph theme (because it is the most representative model of the container and conduit metaphors in school discourse) in which students explored the metaphors they live by, a series of three summary responses to gauge how they were doing with the primary text, a definition paper following Lakoff and Johnson’s metaphorical model of definition, a one party-rational argument, an individual or collaborative research project whereby students were to collect everyday examples of metaphors from sites of their choosing and analyze the use of those metaphors in terms of the personal and cultural attitudes they might reveal, and finally a choice between a reflective or experimental essay they would use to introduce their final portfolio. For the experimental option, they were asked to “challenge the standard conceptual structures that constrain and enable our understanding of writing in order to think differently about an issue of importance for you.” To make a long story short, the class went badly: the majority of students resisted Lakoff and Johnson from the start. They complained about the style of writing, they complained that the material in the book was dated, and again, they asked what this had to do with writing and preparing them for their academic careers--even after reading and discussing Reich on the need for educating “symbolic analysts.” The only successful projects were the five-paragraph theme and the research projects, cases where students could rely on previous knowledge and practices. However, some small successes allowed me to believe I was on the right track: Michael examined reported uses of hate speech on campus and found that what connected these examples of hate speech was a metaphor of “minorities are animals” functioning to dehumanize all non- dominant members of campus society. Julia explored many of the university president’s comments about the university’s diversity initiative and realized that, at least metaphorically, diversity is discussed in similar ways to emotion; that is to say, diversity is conceptualized as fluid in a container (see Lakoff “Anger”), and because all people are containers, diversity is a
12 universal property inherent in all people. Unfortunately, mostly everyone chose the reflective option over the creative option. What happened was that the students turned the social and political problems of metaphor into matters of personal belief, smoothing out any discontinuity between their internal neurological processes and the external world. They used the ontological illusion of continuity to close down the double bind. After blaming myself for not producing the best possible class, I turned to my student’s papers again to try and figure out what went wrong. The majority of reflections took the standard model. The students were skeptical of Lakoff and Johnson’s enterprise, but then, while doing their research paper they experienced an epiphany that proclaimed to them that, indeed, Lakoff and Johnson were on to something, that perhaps there was some merit to understanding metaphor, even though they still didn’t really understand the whole point behind the book. One student, Michael (another Michael) wrote that the best way “to challenge the standard conceptual structures that inform our understanding of writing in order to think differently” is “to challenge the entire philosophy of Lakoff and Johnson.” Michael continues: This is not a one party rational argument paper, so I am not going to lay out my argument for why I think Lakoff and Johnson are wrong. Instead I am going to proclaim myself an unbeliever. I am heretic to the church of metaphorical conceptualization. Whenever I was reading Metaphors We Live By, and I would finish a chapter and think to myself ‘that isn’t right’ or ‘this doesn’t make any sense.’ I don’t see why I would ever think like these men do. I could not think of the world without inherent properties and definitions. I believe that things have independent definitions and properties and this is an important part of life and the way we think of things. At this point, the resistance to Lakoff and Johnson, indeed the production of the double bind started to become clearer in my mind. Michael’s reliance on a religious metaphor yields up an insight: the cause of the double bind, for my students and myself, is not merely about the politics of language and knowledge. It is ontological—it has to do with how we create the categories of experience, and how they relate together to reinforce a belief in reality. For Michael belief is an inviolable property that transcends rationality. In this way, Michael’s reaction resembles the pathology of paranoia as described by Bell in his discussion of Bateson: Michael “really assumes what is meant is harmful” to him. His belief organizes experience for him, and he does not feel the need to explain it. It is “just how things are.” Part of the problem is that Lakoff and Johnson never explicitly say that inherent properties don’t exist. What they do challenge is the traditional correspondence model of truth which guides what they call the objectivist myth, as well as what they call the subjectivist myth which grounds truth in subjective, context-free awareness. Instead, they argue in favor of what they call an experientialist myth of truth: “we see the experientialist myth as capable of satisfying the real and reasonable concerns that have motivated the myths of both subjectivism and objectivism but without either the objectivist obsession with absolute truth or the subjectivist insistence that imagination is unrestricted” (228). What Michael has done is to ground the objectivist myth in the subjectivist myth: there are independent definitions and properties because I believe them to be there. In this case, the student dissolves his or her own double bind with an ontological illusion. This is clearly not a matter of writing and knowledge alone; it is also a matter of ontology. Let me try to demonstrate with an example. One of the ways I try to get my students to understand the power of the conduit metaphor and its primary feature for Lakoff and Johnson, that is that it clearly masks and hides other ways to understand things, is by using the 9-dot problem. The 9-dot problem was developed by Gestalt psychologists to explain the problem of
13 “functional fixedness.” That is, in trying to solve the problem, we fixate on one solution and avoid trying to find other solutions. I attach to my discussion of the problem Lakoff and Johnson’s discussion of the necessity of projection as a means to understand any kind of statement. For Lakoff and Johnson, “understanding a sentence [here I understand Lakoff and Johnson to use sentence as shorthand for an account of an experience] as true in a given situation requires an understanding of the sentence and an understanding of the situation” (169). Thus, understanding is a matter of “fit” between sentence and situation. However, Lakoff and Johnson point out that the situation is not always given as a part of the experience, thus we “may have to” “project” something in order to gain understanding. Lakoff and Johnson provide four types of such projection: projecting an orientation onto something that has no orientation; projecting an entity structure onto something that is not bounded in any clear sense; providing a background in terms of which the sentence makes sense, that is, calling up an experiential gestalt and understanding the situation in terms of the gestalt; getting a ‘normal’ understanding of the sentence in terms of its categories, as defined by prototype; and trying to get an understanding of the situation based on those categories. (169) By using the 9-dot problem within this context, my endeavor is to clarify Lakoff and Johnson’s points, and also to dramatize for my students those points about projection. Also, I hope to reproduce the interest the students showed in their responses to Hundert’s use of the Muller-Lyer illusion by demonstrating how they can take a problem and develop an understanding of it that should have sweeping effects. The problem establishes nine dots in a three by three ratio. The subject is asked to connect all nine dots using four straight lines without lifting their pen or pencil from their piece of paper.
Borrowing from Hundert’s example, I try to demonstrate to my students how the usual inability to solve the nine-dot problem is based on how we conceptualize elements of the world in terms of conceptual frames of which this is a literal example. I try to point out to them that even though there is no frame around the dots, we project one in order to make sense out of it; that is we project, in this case, an “entity structure that is not bounded in any clear case.” I also explain to them that one of the reasons we project the frame the way we do is because we understand ourselves as bounded entities as Lakoff and Johnson point out, but also because our life experience outside of ourselves has been governed to a great extent by a rectilinear culture, as Hundert points out. Invariably, because students are attracted to images like Hundert’s Muller- Lyer illusion, and my use of the nine-dot problem, they find it necessary to point out that their epiphanies about conceptual metaphor were helped along by the discussion of the nine-dot problem. However, they attach to it in terms of a cliché: they report over and over again how it is necessary “to think outside of the box.” I point out to them in the margins of their papers that the point of the nine-dot problem was not to suggest that one think outside of the box; the point is that there is no box and that to think differently requires the rethinking of the conceptual
14 frames we project on to dynamic entities. The ontological power of the concept of bounded entities is so strong that it rewrites the lesson of the nine-dot problem into an ontological illusion. But more so, I would argue, such reductions by my students point also to immersion in our over-saturated tele-visual culture. In a fascinating article, “The Law’s Delay: Cinema and Sacrifice,” Andrew J. McKenna troubles over the power of film to provide viewers with “an economy of sacrifice” whereby retribution for the sins of culture is displaced by watching heroes get their vengeance on stereotypical representations of evil. One of the important concerns of McKenna’s argument is the “ontological illusion projected by motion pictures” (209). McKenna continues by attaching the “ontological illusion” to Barbara Meyerhoff’s understanding of secular ritual: The ontological illusion projected by motion pictures thus accomplishes what Barbara Meyerhoff regards as ‘the most salient characteristic of ritual…its function as a frame. It is deliberate and artificial demarcation. In ritual, a bit of behavior or interaction, an aspect of social life, a moment of time is selected, stopped, remarked upon. But this framing is a fiction. Artificial, its very artifice is denied and the claim is made that its meanings are discovered rather than made up. It claims that things ‘are as they seem,’ as presented.’….The goodness, courage, etc. of the hero is predicated on the evil, cowardice, etc., of the villain…the other becomes a placeholder, a stand-in, for the spectators’ conscience, which is satisfied in inverse proportion to the exercise of critical, conscious judgment. (209) Key to McKenna’s understanding of the ontological illusion in film is the very idea of projection which underscores the Lakoff and Johnson understanding of conceptualization. But also, as with Toulmin’s understanding of the ontological illusion, and Lakoff and Johnson’s understanding of the conduit metaphor, the significance of such ontological illusions is that they make possible the leaving out of important ways of working with and through experience. Borrowing a quotation from Michael Rogin’s classic book on Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: The Movie, McKenna drives his point home: ‘It is the motion picture that shows us not only how we look and sound but—more important—how we feel’….This is indeed an important, if not judicious, statement as it values how we feel, not how we think; it concerns rather how we are made not to think. And it does not even concern how we really feel, but just how we feel unreally, mimetically or medially, according to uniform and prepackaged emotions tailored for maximal distribution. (211) What became clear for me, as I went through this experience in trying to understand why my students looked at and perceived things by embracing the ontological illusion—even when recognizing that it was an illusion—was that like Toulmin argues, while it may be an error (or a fiction in McKenna’s description), it is not an accident. There are practical reasons for such projections of one’s interior world on to the outside if only to guarantee the perceived reality of the outside. That such projections and displacements can be allied to ritual in McKenna and Meyerhoff’s understanding, lead us to recognize it as a kind of culturally informed learned behavior—a habit of human interaction. Here is another example of the power of ontological illusions. Every year I have my students begin with a writing inventory in which they respond to a series of questions about how they go through their writing processes. This inventory is certainly not scientific; rather it tries to get them to engage the issues of composition. During our Lakoff and Johnson course, it occurred to me that I could get my students to use the material provided by Lakoff and Johnson
15 to explore the ways they metaphorically conceptualize their writing processes. The students invariably focused on the conduit metaphor whenever they could find it, and left other metaphors alone. One element I found consistently in their responses to questions about revision was the phrase “going back” to go “over” their previous writing. I came across this phrasing so often I began to recognize it as specific model of conceptualization that must have been taught. While many students address this “going back” in terms of rethinking ideas and not just adjusting grammatical mistakes and so forth, it became clear to me that these students understand revision in relationship to a belief about time. In Metaphors We Live By, Lakoff and Johnson turn to time to explain how seemingly incoherent conceptualizations are, in the end, coherent. There they point out that one of the ways we conceptualize time is by understanding it as a moving object. Hence, we get common everyday phrases in relationship to time like “In the following weeks” and “In the preceding weeks.” Against this conceptualization of time, there is also the common conceptualization that time is a stationary object that we move through. For Lakoff and Johnson these metaphors are not consistent, but they are coherent because they involve our perception that “[t]ime goes past us from front to back” (44). For my purposes, this involves students’ perceptions that their papers being revised are behind them, in a particular place, and the effort at revision is primarily about affirming what happened in that place behind them and not recognizing that the paper also exists in the present or can be re-conceptualized in terms of the future. This understanding of time is another concern of ontology. My point is that composition studies must realize at the core of our relationship with our students is a radical difference—not just in terms of positionality (authority, class, race, gender, education, region, personal history, and all the rest), but also in terms of ontology. Our students come to our classes with varying ontological commitments about the kinds of entities that exist in the world, and the kinds of relations they share. Based on these ontological commitments they make choices about what to believe and how to believe—that is, about how to form relations with others. We need to develop our students’ abilities to understand their ontological commitments and the ramifications of those commitments, while at the same time we determine and develop our own ontological commitments. But this is not just an uncovering process; in fact, the problems that anchor our ontological commitments exceed our grasp of understanding. It must also be seen as a creative process. We need to recognize the necessity of creating double binds in order to release ourselves form the ontological illusions that subject all learning to interiorized projections of value. What must be clear is that the double binds we find ourselves in are partly related to the unstated ontological commitments we make in our pedagogical practices. While I thought the project of studying conceptual metaphor might lead to the creation of and passage through double binds for students, instead I found that language, and in particular conceptual metaphor, helps to establish and maintain people’s ontologies, providing them with ways to populate their worlds with many kinds of entities and relations and that people are often unaware of the ramifications of such constructions on life itself. In fact, I will argue that these ontological illusions reduce the productive capacity of the double bind itself making of learning and experience a site of capture and containment, creating learning as a function of reproducing the same. Ironically, it is also arguable, that composition, in its attention to the work it does, often ends up in the same place as students. In the next chapter, I will explore why that is.
16 Chapter 2 The Pedagogical Imperative, The Double Bind, and The Subjects of Composition What is most interesting about this idea of the double bind is how closely it resembles Lynn Worsham’s, one of composition studies most insightful commentators, understanding of the current state of the field. In her article “On the Rhetoric of Theory,” Worsham, who has done much to close the divide between theory and practice in composition studies, argues that we as a discipline need to be more aware of the rhetoric of the theories we advocate, especially given the kinds of double binds we find ourselves caught up within as we negotiate the boundaries between modern and postmodern theories and practices. In her article, Worsham defines what she refers to as two competing “pedagogical imperatives,” both of which draw on the insights of postmodern challenges to modern sites of capture, but which are ultimately reduced to those modern sites of capture. The first version of the pedagogical imperative reorganizes priorities in literary and cultural studies and claims the classroom as the place to re-create the ideal of democratic citizen and the role of critical education in developing critical consciousness. Here, the pedagogical imperative is the latest expression of the adversarial stance of avant gardism, and it is the legacy of the academic institutionalization of theory which, by the mid 1980’s, abandoned an exclusive focus on language as such and began to emphasize the questions of history and politics. The turn to pedagogy as a form of radical cultural politics coincides with an effort to give postmodernism the political vision it lacked in the 1970’s and early 80’s by linking it to the anti-colonial projects of feminism and multiculturalism. Some versions of postmodern pedagogy are, however, best understood as a modernist end run against postmodernism, for they yoke the insights of postmodernism to a traditional modernist agenda--if not at an epistemological level, then at an affective level. (“Rhetoric” 404) While Worsham does not take the time to construct a list of these particular postmodern pedagogues, she points out an interesting possibility of how “postmodern epistemologies” often times reproduce “modern affects.” In fact, Worsham’s entire oeuvre has been concerned with the reproduction of “modernist affect” and the implicit violence that such takes on emotion yield. Hence, Worsham highlights the particular relationship between epistemology and affect in an endeavor to re-think the affective sphere that gets constructed in pedagogical situations. The conflicting pedagogical imperative Worsham outlines, she claims, is more “conservative.” This pedagogical imperative expresses itself as a demand to abandon the role of education as an agency for social melioration and defines the classroom exclusively as a place for individual learning. Here the pedagogical imperative represents the legacy of bourgeois modernization as it refigures itself for a postmodern, late capitalist society which demands that workers continue to learn all their lives and that schools provide a kind of continuing education never seen before. In this society, literacy will consist not only of subject knowledge but also of process knowledge--or, the ability to learn how to learn. Schools will no longer be the sole providers of education but must join in partnership with business and media. The economic imperatives of late capitalism will increasing hold schools accountable for the achievement and performance of individual learners. This focus on individual performance and merit will undoubtedly mystify the structural injustices that became visible once again and for a brief time in the late twentieth century. (“Rhetoric” 405) This conservative pedagogical imperative reveals its own form of double bind similar to the
17 model implied above: an emphasis on individual learning, partly aimed at the liberation of the individual, reveals itself to challenge any model of collective liberation, thus reconstituting the value of the modernist individualist subject. The purpose of such multiple double binds for Worsham is not just to outline a battle in the discipline. Worsham is interested in drawing our attention to our own lack of agency in the production of curricular agendas. Worsham is concerned that while both pedagogical imperatives muster for position within the field, they need to come to terms “with the demands of the information society and a new definition of universal literacy that may make writing instruction, as we currently conceive it, obsolete” (“Rhetoric” 405). The end result of this problematic is that the “the future of composition studies will be secured through structural changes in higher education that are already underway rather than through struggles internal to the field” (“Rhetoric” 405). Worsham’s concern is that if we let this conflict between imperatives take its course, any response composition will have to such structural changes in higher education will “likely reflect a deep and abiding ambivalence,” which is to say a further double bind. While Worsham seemingly sees the future of composition studies through the eyes of cynical critic, she is not willing to completely relinquish our response to a pathological double bind of capture by larger structural forces. Our response must take the form of a challenge to our own theories and practices. She claims that our response must be “to recover the rhetorics that possess composition studies, its past and future, and to highlight their contradictions through the critical leverage of a perspective that is not easily assimilated to either modernist or postmodernist rhetoric” (“Rhetoric” 405). While, at first, Worsham’s response seems like a call for an endless critique, which it most certainly is on one level, she also implies the possibility of the creation of a perspective that is not subsumed by either modern or postmodern configurations. In many of her articles, Worsham unfolds a citation from 20th century French philosopher Gilles Deleuze. Sometimes she uses it as an epigraph, sometimes as an uncited paraphrase, sometime in a citation, but the force of the phrase is clear every time: “The point of critique,” Deleuze writes in his book Nietzsche and Philosophy, “is not justification, it is another way of feeling, another sensibility” (81). Endless critique is then not just about the revelation of contradictions as the double binds which capture us in multiple ways. It is about releasing us from the double bind through the articulation of different affective modes of existing. This is just to say that a rhetoric of theory will entail the drawing forth of the often-undisclosed ontological commitments that help to create the double binds for our students and ourselves. In response, composition studies needs to articulate an ontology that allows us lines of passage through the double binds, in order to create “another way of feeling, another sensibility.” As such, composition studies needs a new sense of what its subject is. It has become a commonplace in current composition studies that the differences in the characterization of the student writer have led to differing versions of what the subject of composition is. In 1969, George Stade made a bold claim about what the subject of composition should be. Against a host of competitors such as Literature, Communication Skills, Linguistics, The Voice Project, and Logic, Stade suggests what he writes everybody knew all along: “The subject of the course is the students’ writing” (42 italics in original). But even then, the subject of composition was already related in terms of the student writer writing. Stade writes: We want, then, to help the students towards exploring, defining, and so in part mastering themselves and the world around them, which is largely a world of words. We want them to be a larger part of the world and we want the world to be a larger part of them. We want to enlarge their boundaries--not just the boundaries in which they think, but also
18 those in which they act. A person is, at least to others, what he does, how he acts, and a large part of what anyone does is to use words. What one does with words is to a large extent what he is, to himself as well as to others. (42) Here writing is framed particularly as a way to intervene into the student’s formation of the self through the use of language. Through Stade’s use of chiasmus we can already surmise how we will go about this process--dialectically, in the Hegelian sense here--but later he will argue for a specifically Socratic model of getting students to come to awareness about the things they know yet do not know they know through a process of examining the use of words. Through such a dialectic, Stade writes, “people can develop the latent genius in them” (46). Stade’s major claim here, that the subject of composition is student writing, already prefigures the tension that will arise in later versions of composition: is the student writer this Meno character, a version of the self whom James Berlin describes as discovering “through an internal apprehension, a private vision of the world that transcends the physical” (Berlin “Contemporary” 771)? Or is the self this active character that forms and is formed by its use of words and the conventions for its use of words? At any rate, Stade clearly lays out a theory and methodology for composition that marks the site of intervention as student writers writing and thinking through their own experiences with language. Four years later Lou Kelly, in “Toward Competence and Creativity in an Open Class,” will identify the content of the course with the writer: “the content of composition is the writer-- as he reveals his self, thoughtfully and feelingly, in his own language, with his own voice” (3). This is the model of writing that has been labeled by James A. Berlin as “expressionist rhetoric.” For Berlin expressionist rhetorics “emphasize...the ‘I,’ on defining the self so as to secure an authentic identity and a voice” (Reality 153). The problem with such a perspective, in Berlin’s view, is that the epistemology promoted reduces “the material world” to “lifeless matter” and configures the social world as “suspect because it attempts to coerce individuals into engaging in thoughtless conformity” (Reality 145). Reality then becomes the expression of the individual mind, and as such, the self becomes an autonomous individual free from the constraints of the social world and historical context. The expressionist model of the self, then, turns toward Stade’s Socratic understanding of the self. Against this model of expressionist rhetoric Berlin will posit what he calls “social-epistemic rhetoric” which instead of locating the self at the center of rhetorical acts locates language, or discourse at the center. For Berlin “the subject is itself a social-construct that emerges through the linguistically-circumscribed interaction of the individual, the community, and the material world” (“Ideology” 489). Berlin’s endeavor was to make composition a site for political action, to show students how it is that dominant ideology, through the development of discursive structures, frames and constrains their possibility for acting in the social world. By having students work on understanding and criticizing dominant ideology, he hoped to create a critical citizenry that would actively support social change. This would be the other side of the subjective coin, which Stade hints at when he suggests that making student writing the subject of composition can introduce students to verbal communities--communities of ideas, of manners, of cultural style, of ideologies--other than these into which they born. He [the teacher] can help to free them from provincial bias, which takes rumor for truth and takes tribal prejudice for the limits of choice; he can help to free them from the historical fix, which takes the reflexes of the present as the first and last word on how to say and do. (42-3) It is this debate which has come to clearly mark composition studies, so much so that by 1992 Lester Faigley’s Fragments of Rationality will make as its over-riding premise “that many of the
19 conflicts within composition studies concern larger cultural conflicts over the question of the subject” (225). By the 1990’s, then, the subject of composition has become “the subject” in the sense of the agent who writes. Of course, Richard Lanham will broaden the scope of this conflict to cover all of the history of education, humanities education specifically, with his claim in The Electronic Word: Democracy, Technology, and the Arts that the humanities fosters an “uneasy combination of the two basic concepts of the self, central and social, of the two complementary basic conceptions of society, of language as transmission and language as creation, of thought as rule-governed and thought as coaxing chance” (147). But why, you may ask, has the debate over agency and subjectivity caught the attention of composition so much that compositionists are either trying to find ways out of it, or fighting tooth and nail over the definition of the subject? As Faigley makes clear in his presentation of the history of this debate, the challenges to the “rational, autonomous individual” brought about by the process movement and the collaborative learning neopragmatism spearheaded by Ken Bruffee, which saw composition as providing students access to discourse communities, only served either to reinscribe the rational, autonomous individual in the “coherence of the text” (Fragments 225), or ended up “relocating the wholeness of the self-aware subject within a coherent social group” (Fragments 226). In short these models of challenge did not recognize the social differences which help to constitute actually existing subjects in the world. As Susan Miller puts it, these models tended to see the teacher of composition as a “hired mother/maid” figure (particularly because the majority of composition instructors were and still are untenured, part-time women) that “infantalized students” with a “presexual, preeconomic, prepolitical subjectivity” (Textual 192). Of course, now, it is important to recognize a host of other “pre” formations that Miller does not: preracial, preethnic, preembodied, and so forth. Against this history of subjectivity, Faigley posits a postmodern subjectivity that would situate the subject among many competing discourses that precede the subject.…By divorcing the subject from prevailing notions of the individual, whether the freely choosing individual of capitalism or the interpellated individual of Althusserian Marxism, postmodern theory understands subjectivity as constantly in flux. (227) Such a postmodern subjectivity unsettles both those supporters of the autonomous individual and those supporters of discourse communities who critique the autonomous individual, because, as Faigley writes, it leads to a “frustration” about “where to locate agency in a postmodern subjectivity” (227). It is this idea of agency that marks the terrain of composition studies, as it has to do with the issues raised around the concept of the subject as human person, and the subject of the discipline. Rebecca Moore Howard in her review article “Reflexivity and Agency in Rhetoric and Pedagogy” explicates the debate between the rational, autonomous individual and the postmodern subject. As Howard puts it, if the postmodern “subject does not ‘possess’ agency, cannot simply ‘choose’ roles and discourse communities.…what, then, would be the point of composition instruction, which attempts to foster control over the writing process or the ensuing written texts” (349). For Howard, if you take away the agency of the subject, you take away the “traditional purpose and meaning” of “English Studies,” which is to determine “writing and reading as empowering--attributing to subjects the ability to determine themselves and change society” (349). This is, of course, reminiscent of the reasons George Stade gives for conceiving the subject of composition as student writing. But instead leaving it as an either/or construction, either you have agency or you don’t, Howard points to a trend that relies on the concept of reflexivity that “affirm[s] the possibility of subjects/writers/students exerting control over their
20 lives/writing/learning and thus changing society...that affirmation is not a presupposition, but is instead contingent upon acknowledging the subject as socially determined” (349). As Howard puts it, within the texts she reviews which she generalizes to include “rhetorical and pedagogical studies,” “a necessary condition for writing instruction emerges intact: writers may exert control. Given the stability of that condition, composition scholars have the option (but not the requirement) of pursuing the question of “how” (355). But, it seems, the stability of that condition did not remain stable. Although, it is arguable that this issue of the lack of agency in the subject fostered by postmodern models of subjectivity has never really been argued for by anyone in composition and rhetoric, with the possible exception of Victor Vitanza, it is striking how the very possibility of this lack of agency has produced so many responses. So much so that in the November 2000 issue of College English Alan W. France published an article entitled “Dialectics of Self: Structure and Agency as the Subject of English.” France retells the old story of the battle between “expressivists” and “social constructionists” that many have told before. France, however, suggests it is important to recognize this duality as a “local version” of “the global duality in the recent history of social theory: the dichotomy between structure and agency” (148). Here, France presents the same kind of understanding about composition students that Howard does, however with different results: “Since there can be no expression without agency (or structures, for that matter), since all writing is from a personal perspective, then the question becomes not whether but how students ought to use their experience in writing” (148, italics in original). The shift is important; it is now necessary to pursue the question of “how” that Howard identifies. This shift is important because it makes the issue of subject formation itself the subject of composition. France locates this “purpose” within “rhetorical agency since antiquity...learning the practices of personal agency in their relevant social contexts” (149). This purpose then creates broad-based pedagogy that could help to unite the disparate elements of English Studies: My argument, then, is that English studies must work towards a post-Foucauldian ‘technology of the self’ by developing a theoretically informed, meta-discursive writing pedagogy—for both composition and literature--that focuses on the students’ understanding of the dialectic between self and culture. The central concern of such a pedagogy would remain the student who must learn to assemble and assimilate the fragments of postmodern experience into a coherent, self-conscious identity in order to communicate, or to join discourse communities, as we say...this can be done by making inquiry into identity formation itself—into the process of acculturation—the conscious topic of writing assignments across the nominal divisions (composition, literature, film, theory) of English studies curricula. (149) Although I admire the scope of the pedagogy that France puts forward, in the end I wonder how it really differs from the pedagogy George Stade identified back in 1969. Other than differences in terminology and theorists invoked, there is not much of a difference here. And yet, there is. The focus is no longer on the self or on discourse; the focus is on the “dialectic between self and culture,” which is to say on a relation of a particular kind between the self and culture. But, of course, the dialectic was established as the focus for Stade as well. It is interesting, by which I mean, it is important and noteworthy, how pervasive this representation of composition studies has become. For example, let me turn to Joseph Harris’ discussions of this vexed issue of the subject in his book A Teaching Subject: Composition Since 1966. Harris presents this debate in terms of
21 two competing understandings of self. “If you believe,” Harris writes, “you have something like a real self and you want to use language to get at it as fully as you can.... You’d be more likely...to want to say what you think and feel in a kind of non-specialized common language” (42). This is the kind of self Harris attributes to Peter Elbow and he cites from Elbow’s “Reflections on Academic Discourse: How It Relates to Freshman and Colleagues” to show this understanding of self. The passage he cites expresses Elbow’s “[concern] that we help students learn to write language that conveys to others a sense of their own experience--or indeed, that mirrors back to themselves a sense of their own experiences from a little distance, once it’s out there on paper” (Harris 42; Elbow 136-7). In contrast to this real self proposed by Harris as belonging to Elbow, Harris suggests “if you think of the ‘self’ as something formed (in large part) through the pressures of various social discourses and institutions” (42), then you would probably agree with someone like David Bartholomae. Here Harris cites from Bartholomae’s “A Reply to Stephen North”: I think it is wrong to teach late-adolescents that writing is an expression of individual thoughts and feelings. It makes them suckers and, I think, it makes them powerless, at least to the degree that it makes them blind to tradition, power, and authority as they are present in language and culture. (Harris 42; Bartholomae 129) What strikes me as interesting in this version of this by-now classic argument is Harris’ representation of the interlocutors and their versions of self. For example, Harris suggests that the “real self” of Elbow--which is left unmarked by quotes--is a matter of “belief.” When he introduces Elbow’s quote he writes “[t]his is what I think Peter Elbow is trying to get at when he says he is” and then he picks up the quotation from the middle as if Elbow was completing the thought for him. For Bartholomae, the “’self’” is put in quotation marks and is a matter of “think”-ing. Harris introduces Bartholomae’s quotation with “you’d be more likely to agree with David Bartholomae when he argues” and then the quotation appears from the beginning of a sentence, ironically with the first-person pronoun. Harris builds up the intensity of the disagreement by creating a list of binary terms: unmarked real self with marked “self”; saying with arguing; belief and thought. Now on the one hand, this is certainly not a misrepresentation of either Elbow’s or Bartholomae’s representation of their own work; but, on the other hand, I feel Harris is on shaky ground when he describes the “you” who believes in the “real self” as being “more likely...to want to say what you really think and feel in a kind of non-specialized common language” while the “you” of Bartholomae’s marked “self” is left to “be more likely to agree” with his argument. What these turns of phrase point to, really, without outright saying it, are the values that are always put in opposition alongside these competing versions of the self: the Elbow self is more common sensical and more natural, while the Bartholomae version of the self is a thought project and an artificial product. The Elbow version of the self is an everyday version of the self, while the Bartholomae version of the self is elitist. The Elbow version of the self is “really” and freely constituted, the Bartholomae version of the self is dogmatically indoctrinated. In short, Harris’ terms, if not his actual viewpoint, represents France’s structure- agency split that has haunted composition. Allow me here, please, a brief digression. Outside of Washington, D. C., where I grew up, there is an area of highway convergence that the locals call “the mixing bowl.” At one spot, considering that highways move in two directions simultaneously, there are eight major highways that meet at that spot. The traffic gets so densely packed, so quickly, that every day is a traffic jam, and even the locals who have been driving in the area for years have no recourse but to go with the flow of the traffic jam—there really appears to be no way out. This, I take it,
22 is the condition of the state of thinking about the self, subjectivity, and agency in composition studies. You could add more roads—more theories of the self, or subject—or you could widen the existing roads—include other theories of the self into your own—or you could block some roads so nobody can travel down them—remove some theories of the self from the field—but none of these are clear solutions; rather they just make the possible ways into the problem bigger. As it stands, we common sensically see a traffic jam as a static entity, with a specific and clear center—some primary cause like badly conceived roads, impatient drivers, or whatever. However, Mitchel Resnick, a researcher in Artificial Intelligence on “emergent objects,” tells us “a traffic jam isn’t just a collection of cars” because “the cars composing a traffic jam are always changing, as some cars leave the front of the jam and other [sic] join from behind” (141). Because of the constant changing of its constituent parts, the traffic jam resembles more a decentralized phenomenon then a phenomenon with a central cause. In short, our conceptualization of a traffic jam is an ontological illusion, and therefore, it is possible to assume that our battles over subjectivity in composition are the result of a similar ontological illusion. Resnick goes on to suggest that even though the cars are constantly changing, the “traffic jam remains the same traffic jam” (141). It seems to me that the state of understanding subjectivity as an emergent property of the debates over agency resembles just such an emergent object as a traffic jam. Now, one of the major critiques offered against the kinds of research Resnick uses is that the results are always limited by the initial conditions and the number and structures of the rules for movement and relations that each component of the experiment can perform. My question is, then, does composition limit the initial conditions and the relations it is possible to form between the self and other’s—whether they be things, language, other selves or whatever? Is this what is represented by Howard’s understanding of the “stability of agency”? Let us take a look at Harris’ way out of the traffic jam of the self in composition. After delineating the differences between the Elbow self and the Bartholomae self, Harris posits very clearly that “these two views hold much in common—most importantly, a sense that the subject of composition is not only writing but the person who writes, that in changing how they use language students can also change their sense of who they are” (42). Once again, I wonder if this “common ground” is not shaky ground. I find the emphasis on change and the cliché of a “sense of who they are” brings up the matter of person(al) choice in an unproblematic way. This becomes clearer when Harris later argues The point is not to reduce the complexities of writing to a sorting out of personal influences and politics, but to suggest that writers deal not only with codes, but people, not only with genres but situations. The culture does speak to us, and perhaps even through us, but its discourses and commonplaces are heard through and inflected by the voices of individuals. (Teaching 44-5) This framing of the issue resembles greatly France’s framing. I call this the Spellmeyer principle, after Kurt Spellmeyer, because it reiterates the same point he makes in his 1989 essay “A Common Ground: The Essay in the Academy”: teachers should recognize that English 101, with its tolerance for essayistic introspection and digression, is probably the last opportunity most students will ever have to discover the relationship of mutual implication, a relationship fundamental to all writing, between the self and the cultural heritage within which selfhood has meaning. To put it in the simplest terms, we do not deny the socially-constituted nature of either learning or identity when we ask our students to write from their own situations, but I believe it is both disabling and dishonest to pretend that writing, no matter how formal or how
23 abstract, is not created by persons, from within the contexts—historical, social, intellectual, institutional—of their lived experience. (269) To a certain extent, this is kind of like having your cake and eating it too. Or rather, it is like Stade’s and France’s dialectic all over again. I mean this in the sense that James A. Berlin means it when he describes how “expressionistic rhetoric focuses on a dialectic between the individual and language as a means of getting in touch with the self” (Reality 153). I would argue that the traffic jam that emerges around the concept of the subject and agency emerges as it does because the initial conditions of each argument is the same—there is some kind of self or subject, some kind of culture or discourse, and agency as the end result. What all of these versions have in common, then, really is the way in which the elements relate to each other—they all relate dialectically. As such, they mostly all conceive of the function of composition as having to do with the production of knowledge seen in Stade’s words as the “transformation of experience into knowledge” (42) or in France’s terms “the synthesis of experience and culture” (148). In the end, what makes for the possibility of common ground, or indeed a common sense in composition studies, is the fact that although someone like Elbow may privilege the self at the center of the rhetorical act, and someone like Bartholomae may privilege language at the center of the rhetorical act, in the end, the relations that hold between the self and language in these different variants of composition are similar kinds of relations. By this, I mean that the relations they presuppose are dynamic, interactive, and ultimately internal. By internal relations, I mean that the relations are grounded within some essential characteristic of one of its terms—in this case either the self or language. The relations that are possible are tied specifically to this essential character of either the self or language. It is this that leads to the proposed common ground of composition pedagogy that Harris suggests: that the subject of composition is not just writing but the person who writes and to change their use of language is to change their understanding of who they are. I know this is certainly a vexed issue, but was not the point of social constructionist formations of composition as delineated by Bartholomae and others precisely to combat notions of essentialism and other kinds of foundational thought? Yes, but at the end of the day, discourse itself is given essential characteristics in terms of how it does what it does and these configure and determine the kinds of relations that connect selves to things. It is also this similarity of relationships that helps to create the traffic jam around notions of the self in composition. The only real way to solve traffic jams is to change the relations that a culture has between cars, drivers, and roads. If we want to think composition differently, we must rethink relations themselves as central to the enterprise of composition. This is to say, that the primary ontological illusion is that we put the cart before the horse: we account for the terms being related before we account for relations. Fortunately, there have been a number of attempts within composition studies to rethink the ideas of relations that obtain between the self, discourse, and the world. In 1975, Richard J. Basgall wrote an article in College English entitled “On Teaching Relationships.” An article like that published today, or more recently, would probably have more to do with the relationships between teachers and students, or students and students--a classic example would be Lad Tobin's 1993 book Writing Relationships: What Really Happens in the Composition Classroom. Whereas Tobin is interested in “attempting to describe, identify, and analyze...the interactive, dialectic nature of context as it manifests itself in classroom writing relationships” (5), Basgall is more interested in “the importance of relationships or seeing things in terms of other things” (182). Basgall takes us through an experience from a first year composition class he taught. His students were to write a “short essay” based on the following directions: “Describe a visit to a
24 city about which you had some preconceptions. What new things did you learn by visiting it? What preconceptions did you revise and how did you do it? As you were doing this, what was happening to the city itself?” (182). Through a process of question and answer—but all stemming from a fragment from one sentence in a student essay which is “what I saw standing before me”—Basgall helps his students to become aware that “practically all…'qualities' [e. g. shortness, tallness, thinness, thickness] that we tend to attribute to a thing in writing and speaking are not attributes of that thing at all but are simply relationships that we make between things and which we then, unfortunately, attribute to the things themselves” (183, emphasis in original). The point Basgall is making here is a point that derives from the American pragmatist tradition that claims that relations are real. For example, William James writes: “the relations between things, conjunctive as well as disjunctive, are just as much matters of direct particular experience, neither more nor less so, than the meanings themselves” (Meaning 7). To say that relations are real is to suggest that any ontological account, which derives from experience, must take into account not just the things, but also their relations. As James makes clear, the significance of the reality of relations is that there is no need for any “extraneous trans-empirical connective support” like “substances, transcendental egos, or absolutes” (Meaning 7). One of James’ main points in developing his theory of the reality of relations was to counter the absolute idealism of F. H. Bradley and thus offer a pluralistic account of the world. To do this, James had to not only argue for the reality of internal relations—internal relations are relations derived from some inherent, or essential characteristic of the things or terms being related—but also external relations. In an absolute idealism, the structure of the world would be represented by what we would today call a totality or a closed system. In such a totality, or closed system, there can be no external relations because each microcosm of the whole would have to be a direct representation of the totality—which is to say that the same kinds of relations would have to hold between objects with the essential characteristics of whatever substance provides a foundation for the world. External relations, then, are defined by James as “a relation which can change without forcing its terms to change their nature simultaneously” (Pluralistic 363). James describes this concept of relation by reference to a manuscript: “My manuscript, for example, is on the desk. The relation of being ‘on’ does not implicate or involve in any way the inner meaning of the manuscript or the inner--these objects engage it only by their outsides, it seems only a temporary accident in their respective histories” (Pluralistic 80). For Basgall, the next move is to explain “why” it is students think the way they do about relations. He writes that students “tend to hold on to the idea that a thing is a thing with certain distinctive qualities and attributes inherent in it to be defined permanently in the dictionary or in their heads by a name or a ‘label’” (183). For Basgall, then, the problem is that students tend to think of relations as internal because their understanding of words implies that words contain the essence of the thing they designate. In his history, “The Concept of Relation,” Julius Weinberg writes that part of the problem people have with understanding relations as external is that “the acquisition of language requires us to collect under one term of discourse those qualities which mutually cohere in our experience” (118). That is to say that in learning language we have a tendency to match up like words with like. In addition, Weinberg adds that when dealing with noun-substantives, we tend to include in the meaning of terms “their characteristic function or purpose” (118). This, Weinberg argues has two effects: “it concentrates attention on the referents of nouns...it tends to absorb the meaning of transitive verbs into that of their nominatives, accusatives, datives, etc.” (118). Because of this everyday experience with language, we have a hard time making sense of the idea that relations can be external to their
25 terms. Gilles Deleuze, in his book Empiricism and Subjectivity will go as far as to say “all relations are external to their terms,” and it is that very fact which marks empiricism as empiricism for Deleuze. Basgall, however, does not have such radical ideas on his agenda. The assignment Basgall creates, however, has gotten students to question the idea of the “city itself” because “[t]here is only the city as seen by someone through an individual, chosen perspective” (183). These chosen perspectives, however, Basgall informs us, come from “some system of thought or relationships, such as sociology, economics, politics, physics, chemistry, religion, psychology, etc., and even within these systems of thought we have a wide variety of perspectives to choose from” (183). Here, once again, we get caught in the traffic jam as Basgall attributes perspective both to a choosing subject and to systems of thought, which we would now call discursive formations or institutions. Basgall claims the importance of such an “awareness” about the role of relations is to get students away from thinking in terms of what he calls “absolutes,”: “clichés, regional folklore, rumor, and expected trains of thought which are customarily taken as absolutes” (184). This leads to one of the goals of freshman composition as Basgall sees it, which is to free the student from these restrictive habits of thinking early in his [or her] college career and thereby open him [or her] up, so to speak, to the new perspectives that he [or she] will encounter in various disciplines along the way, while at the same time bringing him [or her] to realize that these are but systematized perspectives, some of which are more fruitful and useful than others, but none of which are final absolutes. (184) Within the rhetoric of this paragraph is the language of seventies liberalism—freeing the student, opening them up, new perspectives—which is about individuating the student through the recognition of perspectival thought. But, I would also argue, that there is a radical potential not yet actualized in the ideas Basgall articulates about the teaching of relationships. The other reason Basgall gives for recognizing the importance of relations develops from the discussion of language above. Basgall reiterates his earlier point about how students think through the definitions of things, and adds to it that the student tends to become bound by the sense of identity that our language structure sets up between words and things, and he [or she] finds it difficult to break away from this customary, established identity and call things by new names, as he [or she] must do if he [or she] is to progress in his [or her] thinking, and especially if he or she is to be creative in his [or her] own personal expression. (184) For Basgall rethinking relations seems to have the capacity for helping strategies of invention, or perhaps this would be better put as “intervention,” because one is rethinking their relations to words in order to think otherwise. In addition, by making relations real, Basgall makes it possible to bring ontological issues into the classroom. Relations, as real entities, become moments of inquiry into the production of experience. That is to say, given the reality and externality of relations, student bodies become constitutive not of bodies as bounded entities, but of bodies as radically open assemblages, assemblages always already part of larger assemblages that constrain and enable multiple possibilities. Of course, Basgall does not say it that way, but by placing relations at the center, and not the student subject or language; we can see the possibility of that potential. That potential can be realized if we take relations themselves to be the primary subject matter of composition. Basgall hints at this, but for whatever reason he holds onto the liberal belief in the voluntaristic, autonomous subject. So, while granting relations a reality of their own, that reality is maintained only subjectively as an act of mind. By turning relations back to material reality, we can rethink relations as the subject matter of composition in
26 order to think composition differently. Bringing relations to the forefront of composition studies allows us to rethink the problematic of experience, in hopes of a way to counter the ontological illusions that capture our students in negative and unproductive double binds. To that end, in the next chapter, I will turn to two recent conceptualizations of experience in composition studies.
27 Chapter Three Rethinking Experience and Relations in Composition In two very complex articles, one by Kurt Spellmeyer and one by Min-Zhan Lu and Bruce Horner, the writers endeavor to rethink experience in terms of how it can reconstruct our relations to the external world. In fact, Lu and Horner respond to Spellmeyer’s piece on the basis that his reconstruction of experience takes the wrong kind of relation as the starting point. Spellmeyer’s article, like a lot of his other work, is both dense and fairly polemical. What happens in these two pieces is that their endeavor to get out of the traffic jam of subjectivity requires them to turn to differing models of reflexive action on the part of the writers. In the end, I will argue that while Spellmeyer has some interesting moments, it is Lu and Horner who put composition in the better position to maneuver out of the traffic jam of the self. In his 1989 article “Common Ground: the Essay in the Academy,” Spellmeyer attempted to include the arguments of social construction while at the same time holding on to a maximum amount of agency for the subject by arguing that the subject’s lived experience could help the subject override discursive constraints. In his 1996 essay, “After Theory: From Textuality to Attunement with the World” Spellmeyer qualified his arguments in the “Common Ground” article with a particularly nasty polemic against theory. Working against what he sees as the theoretical supremacy of textuality, Spellmeyer argues for student writing to be more involved in what he calls “the ethnography of experience” because theoretical “rhetoric” tends to take agency away from readers through a ruse: “While attempting to make room for the excluded and disempowered, the theorist continues to occupy a privileged place indistinguishable from the scientist’s role as objective observer, or from the philosopher’s pretensions to pure reason” (“After” 899). The danger of this ruse, Spellmeyer insists, is that “knowledge as we produce it in the academy...helps to perpetuate a truly global system of dependency” through the “maintenance of a boundary between ‘ignorance’ and ‘knowledge,’ mystification and enlightenment” (“After” 899). As a result, the practicing theorist can be identified as “a knowledge-class professional” (“After” 899). It is here, perhaps, Spellmeyer is at his most polemical, but in the process he brings to the forefront the motivation for his anger with the current academic system: the very relations by which the academic world perpetuates itself. He critiques the role of theory in professionalization, using the example of a sociologist disillusioned by the difference between his academic life of scathing critique and his comfortable existence as a tenured professor. Spellmeyer writes: “Sociologists can write the most scathing critiques, or they can take on the more conventional role of Parsonian apologists for the status quo, but in either case they often leave unchallenged—and unchanged—the basic relations of production today, including the production of knowledge itself” (“After” 900). Spellmeyer understands the current relations of production of knowledge by members of the academy to be as a part of the “larger class of knowledge workers” which “has raised itself above the proletariat by not only its knowledge but its expertise as well: its capacity...to generate novel kinds of knowledge, virtually nonstop” (“After” 901, emphasis in original). He contrasts this with premodern societies, where the value of knowledge was based on the fact that it did not change. He writes that today, “the value of most knowledge rapidly decays once the luster of its novelty has dimmed. For this reason, the power of the knowledge class lies in the production of estrangement rather than in the preservation of stability” (“After” 901, emphasis in original). It is these relations of production that Spellmeyer sees as dominant, relations that constantly transform the conditions of the world by turning experience into a form of textual alienation, and thus removing any sense of our lived
28 experience as members of a culture. In order to promote new “relations of production” Spellmeyer turns to a model of attunement which he derives from Shigenori Nagatomo’s book Attunement Through the Body, a philosophical text using Eastern sources to challenge traditional Western models of rationality and mind-body dualism. Spellmeyer’s point in invoking Nagatomo, I think, is two-fold. First, he clearly wants to transform the understanding of the relation of the self to the material world, and second, he wants to promote a version of the self whose knowledge comes out of its processes of embodiment. Returning to his critique of textuality, Spellmeyer argues that What gets lost in the semiotic universe is the crucial distinction between ‘codes’ or ‘signs,’ which simply ‘signify,’ and the living words that foster a ‘felt’ resonance between ourselves and the world....So long as our language remains routine—only an array of ‘codes’ and ‘signs’—its essential character is concealed from us, but when words begin to resonate, we undergo a bodily and emotional transformation. To be insulted, to be caught in an error or in a lie, to hear unexpectedly that a loved one has died, is to feel intensely even before we are able to understand exactly what has just happened. We have all been carefully trained to dismiss these reactions as incidental to the dynamics of ‘textuality’ but signification cannot occur without an experiential anchoring, since we know and remember only what has changed our immediate relations to the world. (“After” 906-7, emphasis in original) The essential character of language, as Spellmeyer would have it, when words begin to “resonate” is “when our words do their proper work by making the world more fully present to us” (“After” 910). For Spellmeyer, this making of the world more fully present leads to a sense of “feeling at home in the world” or attunement, and “[t]o pursue attunement, to renew emotional coherence, is not simply to challenge the existing order, but to help fashion an alternative” (“After” 910). For Spellmeyer, attunement is an intensely emotional relation to the world that because of its intensity can help create an alternative order. As Spellmeyer would have it, this alternative has nothing to do with traditional models of resistance and revolt: “no alternative is more revolutionary than our resistance to disembodiment and the pursuit of wholeness in our immediate experience” (“After” 910). Attunement, then, is a type of relation that connects the self to the world as a whole, creating, apparently a connection to some higher design—a part of a larger part. Spellmeyer suggests that it is practices of art as “traditions of attunement with the world” that are the best way to explore this alternative. The work of English Studies in helping to fashion this alternative is “to become ethnographers of experience...scholar/teachers who find out how people actually feel” (“After” 911, emphasis in original). Such an endeavor, Spellmeyer believes, will renew English studies because “the search for basic grammars of emotional life may give us the future that we never have had, a future beyond the university” (“After” 911). For the moment disregarding his polemical stance against theory and textuality, Spellmeyer’s argument is valuable to composition studies in that he rethinks the production of knowledge based on the particular relations a given body has with the world—namely a relation of attunement. He is trying to answer the problem of the pedagogical imperative as outlined by Lynn Worsham through requiring that those in English studies take particular notice of the role of relations in the production of experience and knowledge. In addition, Spellmeyer also points out the role of emotions in this relational process and, indeed, marks emotion as a significant aspect of the attunement process. Of course, there is much to critique in Spellmeyer’s plan of pursuing “ethnographies of
29 experience,” and below I will discuss how Lu and Horner critique his position. For the moment I want to consider what Spellmeyer means by “searching for the basic grammars of emotional life.” The implication of such a statement is that there is some kind of pure, unmediated emotional experience that motivates our relations with the world. By locating these basic elements, we can then, I am assuming here, make possible some pure form of communication wherein there is no noise, and only complete understanding between interlocutors. This is perhaps what he means when he writes of words beginning to resonate. However, things without any particular meaning may resonate in such a way that they provide intense emotional attachment but without anything like attunement as Spellmeyer describes it, but an attachment that signifies a kind of empty belonging. The “Words Cannot Describe” essay I discussed in Chapter 1 is such a “basic grammar of emotional life.” In addition, Lawrence Grossberg, in his study of what he calls the affective logic of contemporary culture, suggests that emotions are turned toward conservative ends precisely through the location of such “grammars of emotion.” Grossberg writes of the role of these “grammars of emotion” in the production of conservative political campaigns: Using very diverse focus groups (including people from different political positions) and a technology called Perception Analyzers, they construct ‘values maps.’ Such maps do not measure belief or even understanding but something called ‘average emotional response.’ They measure the intensity of people’s affective response: the higher the score, the better the slogan or appeal. Thus for example ‘a thousand points of light’ was a top scorer although no one in the various focus groups knew what it meant. But that doesn’t matter; in fact, it is good, because understanding is ‘unmanageable’ and ‘uncontrollable.’ (We 258) Emotion, however, is eminently controllable. To assume that people can access their emotions unmediated by relations of a social nature--that is, to find the basic grammar of emotion--is to presuppose too much about how emotions work. Emotions, as Lynn Worsham describes them, are no more immediately available to a person as their language is immediately available to them, that is unfettered by larger social relations (“Emotion” 122). Spellmeyer, here, assumes an embodied existence that can by force of mind alone separate out the relations formed between language and emotions and body. It is around this point, Spellmeyer’s characterization of the relations between a subject and their experience, that Min-Zhan Lu and Bruce Horner find fault. Lu and Horner, in their 1998 article “The Problematic of Experience: Redefining Critical Work in Ethnography and Pedagogy,” point out that while Spellmeyer is “concerned with the subversive power of experience” (258), Spellmeyer’s assertion that “the body, and not language, is the source of the self and the doorway into the living world” (Spellmeyer “After” 908; Lu and Horner 259) “posits a polarized, hierarchical relation between experience and discourse (‘text’), valorizing experience as both prior to and greater than discursive understanding” (259). Ultimately, their point is that Spellmeyer got his relations wrong. They write, “the relation between experience and discourse is not polar and hierarchical but dialectical” (259). They continue: A failure to acknowledge that dialectical relation...dissolves the tension between experience and discourse and so evacuates experience of its social materiality: how the experience of ‘ordinary sensuous life” (including the experience of the body) is socially produced as both ‘ordinary’ and ‘sensuous.’ (Lu and Horner 259) Their endeavor in their critique of Spellmeyer is to bring the discursive element, which they refer to as the social materiality of discourse, back into an understanding of the “subversive power of
30 experience.” To do so, Lu and Horner draw on the work of Raymond Williams and Elspeth Probyn. Through Williams, Lu and Horner are able to explain “how and why this tension [between experience and discourse] is important for critical ethnography and pedagogy” (259). They emphasize what Williams terms “practical experience,” a kind of everyday experience of thoughts and feelings which the fixed structures of official interpretations neither “speak at all” nor “recognize” (Lu and Horner 260). Here they cite Williams, and it is important to present that citation in full, because of Williams’ representation of it as “embryonic”: [T]he actual alternative to the received and produced fixed forms is not silence: not the absence, the unconscious, which bourgeois culture has mythicized. It is a kind of feeling and thinking which is indeed social and material, but each in an embryonic phase before it can become a fully articulate and defined exchange. (Lu and Horner 260, Williams 131) For Lu and Horner, recognizing the “social and material” within experience cancels the possibility of seeing the relations between experience and discourse as polar and hierarchical. Rather they are combined in a dynamic tension which, quoting from Williams again, “must approach ‘thought as felt and feeling as thought’” (260). To return to Spellmeyer, the attunement model is after “a felt sense of being at home in the world” (905) which privileges feeling at the expense of thought, and makes of feeling, as Lu and Horner point out, “a realm of private escape from rather than participation in the social” (260). What Williams allows Lu and Horner to do is to break down the existing dichotomy between thinking and feeling without recourse to traditional models of the universal, autonomous, and stable subject. The dialectical relations of tension between experience and discourse, or feeling and thinking, dramatically unsettle any such notion of the universal subject. Of course, with such an understanding, the issue of agency comes up. To answer the question of agency, Lu and Horner turn to the work of Elspeth Probyn. Probyn's work derives a lot of its insights from Williams, and Lu and Horner point this out. But for the most part, Lu and Horner are interested in the fact that Probyn makes possible two uses for experience: the ontological and the epistemological. The ontological refers to “’the immediacy of what is and what must be,’ the ‘felt facticity of material being’” (Lu and Horner 260, Probyn 5). The ontological aspect of experience locates “a disjuncture between the articulated and the lived aspects of the social” (Lu and Horner 260, Probyn 22). To that extent we can see the clear relationship between Williams’ understanding of practical experience as having an “embryonic phase”: it is the lived experience of the social that is such a phase. The epistemological aspect of experience “‘impels an analysis of the relations formulated between the articulated and the lived’” (Lu and Horner 260; Probyn 22). The upshot for Lu and Horner is that “experience can be used to overtly politicize the ontological” (Lu and Horner 260, Probyn 16). To Lu and Horner, this means “we can use experience not simply to affirm our state of being but to raise questions about that material being, to critique and bring about changes in the conditions of our existence and, in turn, to transform our experience” (Lu and Horner 261). From this point, Lu and Horner identify a series of terms and questions that map “the problematic of experience” and “recur in the debates on the meaning and use of experience in critical ethnography and pedagogy”: How to acknowledge the social materiality of individual experience? How to sustain the critical tension between experience and language? How to define experience as ongoing and transformative rather than fixed and self-evident? How to politicize experience by
31 making it work both ontologically and epistemologically? (261) Lu and Horner trace these issues through looking, first, at various practices of critical ethnography and pedagogy in the work of ethnographers, teachers, researchers, and students. From critical ethnography, they recognize three “lines of inquiry” ethnographers use in constructing their experience with informants: “how to represent the experience of an other”; “how to represent experience to another”; and “how to politicize experience with the aid of others” (262). Such a practice, they argue, is an “interventionist praxis” (262). Next, they turn to critical pedagogy. They want to “urge teachers and researchers to explore ways of using the disjunction between how we experience our work and official discursive formulations of our work to critically analyze and intervene in the material conditions of that work” (269) and “thus redefine the meaning and use of experience by exploiting the tension in our work between teaching and research” (275). But before that they make an important distinction between what ethnographers do and what teachers do: We think that the challenges for interventionist practices are somewhat different in classrooms, where the social, material conditions include the goal of change—learning— built into the educational contract between teacher and student. The emphasis on having students tell their experiences and teachers comprehend them connects pedagogy with ethnography. However, what happens to the ‘there’—the students and their experience— as a result of the telling is pushed to the forefront because of the teachers’ commitment to bring change to the student. For composition classrooms, where critical thinking is often a central component of reading and writing instruction, the ontological and epistemological uses of experience can be built into the course. (265) It is precisely this difference of learning that leads Lu and Horner to worry that most models of critical pedagogy tend toward “the teacher's own experience of being and knowing overwriting the student's experience” (267). Because of this they call for those who want to challenge the “asymmetrical power relations to learn to make productive use of, rather than dismiss, the challenges students' lived experience pose for the teacher’s understanding of that discursive experience” (267). This will lead to the “confrontation between the ontological and epistemological levels of experience...for both the teacher and the student” (267). In the final section of their article they consider certain practices by some teachers that deal with such confrontations. For example, they cite certain specific examples from compositionists working with students’ literacy experiences, including “Translating Self and Difference Through Literacy Narratives” by Mary Soliday, a chapter from The Social Uses of Writing by Tom Fox, and “Reading and Writing Difference” by Min-Zhan Lu. They locate as most interesting in these pedagogical practices, tasks asking “students to rethink, and so revise, their literacy practices”: these pedagogies aim at disrupting students’ ‘normal’ literacy experiences in two ways: in students’ understanding of their past experience, and in their subsequent (future) experience. Such pedagogies thus politicize experience, using it to instigate change in both consciousness and practice. (273) Although they consider these practices admirable, they find fault with them to the extent that they do not follow the lead of “critical ethnography in experimenting with ways of including the experience of the teacher/researcher in critical analysis and intervention” (273). Such experimentation, they argue, will help to keep the experience of teachers and researchers from overwriting the student’s by getting the researcher to investigate “the latent tension between teaching and research: between the desire to teach a particular understanding of literacy and the
32 desire to learn about literacy from the student’s lived experience, between the desire to change student's literacy experiences and the desire to grasp their existing experience” (273). In short, the goal is to have teacher/researchers continuously problematize their desires and experiences in order to better represent their students' experience—both ontologically and epistemologically. There is much to admire in Lu and Horner's call for intervening into our own practices. Their analysis brings to the forefront the ontological and the epistemological as social and material practices of experience. Their recognition that the dialectical relation between language and experience as a tension avoids the problem of teleology that most dialectical theories propose. In short there is no teleological synthesis to be had in the end; any synthesis will always already be constituted by that tension. As well, they turn the normal model of self- reflexivity into a double model of self-reflexivity, which also turns it against any easy method of interiorization. This is admirable work, and I would say it gets it close to the kind of radical re- thinking of relations that Basgall’s work begins (see Chapter 2). But I wonder if their call for the recognition of the ontological and the epistemological in experience is strong enough to escape from the traffic jam of Harris’ common ground: “in changing how students use language they can also change their sense of who they are” (42). While Spellmeyer, certainly, would locate himself within such a formulation, both he and Lu and Horner help us to understand how much more complicated the prospect of change is. They also point to a different spot to focus on: do not try to change the self or language, try to change our experience constituted here as certain kinds of relations--to the world for Spellmeyer, to the disjunction between the ontological and epistemological in Lu and Horner. The problem with a phrase like Harris’ (about how change is constructed through language) is that it always performs the same kind of reductions of the ontological illusion. This may not be his intention, and he may thinks he escapes such a characterization by emphasizing “use,” but even there the verb is slipping into the nominative with use being a function of the autonomous subject. For Lu and Horner, I think when they problematize the issue of experience, they do not draw the categories small enough. What I mean by this is that they imply that the ontological and the epistemological are two distinct, autonomous fields. To a certain extent, then, they reproduce the dualism of social epistemic theories that Daniel Royer criticizes (see Chapter 1). In terms of the larger picture of composition studies we can see these reconstructions of the work of composition by Spellmeyer, on the one hand, and Lu and Horner, on the other hand, as extensions of Worsham’s double bind of the pedagogical imperative. Spellmeyer opts for the “continuous learning model” and Lu and Horner opt for the critical model of the critical citizen as ethnographer. In my mind this reveals the major problematic of composition: the problematic of agency. What if, I wonder, the question of agency is the ontological illusion par excellence of composition studies? At the core of this thought is either the presupposition of the subject (as is the case with Spellmeyer and others of the conservative branch of the pedagogical imperative) as a bounded entity who manipulates its relations (thus giving it agency); or the subject as the implied end result of learning, defined as the changing of social and material practices (where learning stands in for agency). What I want to argue is that such positions lead to Worsham’s notion of the pedagogical imperative because they both assume a model of the human body as bounded entities that are still partly separate from experience. In traditional ontological or metaphysical terms, this would mean that the substance that makes up a human being is different from the substance that makes up other aspects of the world. Such viewpoints always presuppose a duality that separates the human from the animal, culture from nature, thinking from being, and so forth in order that one may act upon it. If it is the desire for agency that
33 constitutes an important aspect of the pedagogical imperative, and that desire takes the form of the construction of the complete and full human body whether as Spellmeyer’s attuned body or Lu and Horner’s critical body, we might want to explore options that challenge this desire for agency and the types of bodies it entails. If the point of critique is, as LynnWorsham suggests borrowing from Gilles Deleuze, “not justification, but a different way of feeling: another sensibility,” then we need to push the insights generated by scholars like Spellmeyer and Lu and Horner to their limits. To do so, I want to start with what appears as a curious coincidence. Worsham cites the above quote by Deleuze at a number of points in her work: as an epigram for “Emotion and Pedagogic Violence” and its revision “Going Postal,” and as the last footnote in “Writing Against Writing: The Predicament of Ecriture Feminine in Composition Studies.” This repetition could imply, at least for Worsham, that Deleuze marks the limit-point, or perhaps the outside of composition.4 I would argue that this is also the case for Spellmeyer and Lu and Horner. At the beginning of “After Theory,” Spellmeyer takes as one of his objects of theory to ridicule Deleuze and Guattari’s practice of schizoanalysis. Of course, Spellmeyer’s point there is ultimately to reduce the theoretical reliance on text and codes as substituting for actually existing world and people's words. Now one could go on and on about Spellmeyer's misunderstood application of current theory, or one could be disappointed and resentful of his particularly hateful attack on a theorist whose use of language he ridicules, but my endeavor is only to point out how Spellmeyer missed a fusion of the horizons, or an attunement with Deleuze. Here are Deleuze and Guattari on how they read a book: “We will never ask what a book means, as signified or signifier; we will not look for anything to understand in it. We will ask what it functions with, in connection with what other things it does or does not transmit intensities, in which other multiplicities its own are inserted and metamorphosed” (Thousand 4). While certainly there are differences between Deleuze and Guattari and Spellmeyer, they share the same impulse to deny the primacy of the textual. And certainly, Deleuze and Guattari do develop their own vocabulary of terms like “schizoanalysis,” but in terms of jargon it is no worse than Spellmeyer’s use of terms like “attunement,” “relations of production,” or even “emotional, sensuous life.” Sure we know what these words mean, primarily because we have seen them before—more often than we have seen words like “schizoanalysis” or “deterritorialization”—but to imply that there is some kind of inherent difference in these words is to fall back into the problematic that Basgall and Weiner explained to us as to why people see relations as internal, because people attach traditional functions to the words. Deleuze and Guattari (as do, I would argue, the other theorists Spellmeyer ridicules) create words to critique the dominant relations they have come to imply—their use of words is to complicate rather than to simplify, to try to create “a different way of feeling: another sensibility.” Spellmeyer misses the ways that Deleuze
4 While the work of Gilles Deleuze and his collaborator Felix Guattari have started making its way into composition studies more recently, and indeed in all of the humanities, it still strikes me that their work maintains a limited influence. I would argue that the reason for this is that Deleuze has come to be associated with a kind of “anything goes” postmodernism defined by models of “endless play.” The work of Victor Vitanza, in spite of his best efforts, has partly led to this understanding of Deleuze—people in composition rarely see the serious face that makes possible Vitanza’s comedic, and ironic performances. Whatever the representation, I think all of these viewpoints make a serious mistake, forgive the pun, by reading Deleuze as a “transgressive theorist” or a “thinker of transgression.” To make the most productive use, one must read him as a theorist of resistance, of creating and producing the conditions which make resistance more productive of difference. Regardless, even in spite of recent endeavors, Deleuze still maintains a position as the outside or limit of composition. His stance on agency is just one mark of that. 34 and Guattari could help him in his analysis of the primacy of the textual, because he is too concerned with helping people hold on to some originary emotion which has defined their life and he feels they have lost. For Lu and Horner, marking Deleuze as a limit has more to do with the scope of their article. Their main emphasis is on how critical ethnography and pedagogy can inform one another in helping to rethink and remake the work we do in composition. To the extent that they turn to the work of Elspeth Probyn they approach Deleuze because Probyn uses Deleuze to conceptualize how it is the ontological and the epistemological constitute, not the self, but the practice of the self. Probyn writes: I am arguing for a practice of the self that operates at both the ontological and the epistemological levels. Moreover, against a logic which insists that emotions are a private matter and knowledge a public affair, which seeks to divide the self in two; I want to argue that speaking the self, of necessity, blurs the distinction between private or public, inside or outside. As Gilles Deleuze argues, rather than one or the other, we need to think in terms of the double: “the double is never a projection of the interior, it is on the contrary an interiorization of the outside” (Foucault 105). Folded upon each other...the question becomes how to constitute “an inside co-present with an outside, applicable to the outside?” (Deleuze Negotiations 159). For the moment we can simply state that once it is spoken, the self is out there, and its discursive effects attest to its materiality. As it speaks of how it got there, it is both ontological and epistemological. (88). The concept of “the fold,” worked through by Deleuze in his books on Foucault and Leibniz, is an important part of how one is to configure the relations between the ontological and the epistemological, the experiential and the discursive. I would argue that Lu and Horner have a commitment to the discursive as the site of agency for the subject, and that this commitment requires them to work only within the social materiality of discursive effects on the constitution of the subject--in terms of what we would call the positions people occupy in terms of race, class, gender, sexuality, and other things, although as we will see, in his later work, Horner will constitute the “student” as the primary subject position. This does not put as much emphasis on what Williams terms the “embryonic phase” of the “felt facticity of being,” which while it is certainly folded with the discursive, does not reduce the social to the discursive only. The embryonic in Williams is what Deleuze will refer to as the virtual--that which is real without being actual--with the difference being that embryonic implies a model of organic growth involving the former with the latter. For Deleuze, there is a real difference between the virtual and the actual, and the problem of the fold is an endeavor to describe how the elements of the virtual break into the actual. Lu and Horner move us closer to understanding how we can use Deleuze, as the limit or outside of composition, to help us rethink composition.
35 Section Two: Affect
36 Chapter Four: Critical Conditions: The Point of Critique “The point of critique is not justification but a different way of feeling: another sensibility.” (Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy 94) Setting the Stage The work of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, singularly and collectively up to this point, has had only minimal impact on composition studies as a discipline. Contemporary theorists and critics use these two radical thinkers because, in the words of Lawrence Grossberg, they are searching for tools, voices, and concepts that will allow us to understand the making of the present as the becoming of the future. They all turn to Deleuze and Guattari, perhaps out of a sense of frustration at the limits of the thinking we have inherited, perhaps out of a sense of joy at the thinking they offer us. Each seeks a way through the chaos without constructing prisons (whether the same old one or new ones). Each seeks an ethical analysis that speaks to the territories—the timespaces—of human (and perhaps nonhuman) lives. Each seeks to open up new possibilities and perspectives on our own lives by trying to draw new lines between an unfinished present and an already begun future. Each seeks to find ways to let us see what has not been seen, to say what has not been said, and in the space between, in the space of such an analysis, to find new possibilities for hope, and new hope for possibilities. (“Animations” 7-8) At the same time that Grossberg delineates such a hopeful use for the work of Deleuze and Guattari, in his introduction to the value of their work for sociological theory, William Bogard informs his readers that “[a] field of knowledge is only as interesting as its most dangerous ideas, the ones that escape its control and crack its own foundations” (52). Bogard continues: Consider the following claims: (1) sense makes language possible; (2) the subject is a machine assemblage whose coordinates are only contingently those of the human, or even organic, body; and (3) every society is a collection of dismembered body parts. For sociology, which tends to think that sense presupposes language, that the subject is necessarily human, and that society consists of communicating subjects, not body parts, these claims would certainly amount to dangerous ideas. (52) The challenge that the works of Deleuze and Guattari pose to sociology they also pose to composition studies. What strikes me as interesting is how their theory has the capacity to not only reduce frustration and create joy, but is also dangerous at the same time, which is to say, it is most interesting that the work of Deleuze and Guattari enters into literary, cultural, and composition studies through an affective register. As such, it is really no surprise that their work has recently found a place in composition studies: its increasing influence can be marked by showing how it emerges with composition’s increased engagement with issues of affect and emotion, the relationship between such concerns about emotion and the work we ask ourselves and students to do in the era of contemporary capitalism, the development of alternative (anti-Enlightenment and anti-dialectical) rationalities, the reclamation of the socialized individual subject, and the challenge to models of process as the primary focus of writing pedagogy. But more so, I would argue, what makes the emergence of the work of Deleuze and Guattari possible for twenty-first century composition studies is the particular way critical theory and theoretical discourse have themselves become modes of critique. We have arrived at a point in composition studies, according to Lynn Worsham in “On the Rhetoric of Theory in the Discipline of Writing: A Comment and a Proposal,” where “in the
37 eyes of many commentators, ‘the age of theory’ has ended rather indecorously, which puts us in a ‘post-theoretical age’ where the emphasis is on politics and history” (389). The work of Deleuze and Guattari thus has benefited from and been hampered by the fact of entering into composition studies after the heyday of the theory wars which ended with most in agreement that any theory was useful to the extent it ended up in some kind of pedagogical practice. This moment is beneficial for their work because it did not have to suffer the fear and resistance to theory that plagued early responses of the field to thinkers like Lacan, Barthes, Foucault, Lyotard, and Derrida. And so some compositionists working on the edges of composition, best exemplified by Victor Vitanza in his article “Three Countertheses,” were able to fold Deleuze and Guattari into their theoretical mix without much resistance. Vitanza, in effect, was able to create a counter-tradition within composition studies, based significantly on the work of Deleuze and Guattari, that made it possible for their work to flourish in the post-theoretical age. On the other hand, the ‘post-theoretical’ age in composition studies, best exemplified by the work of Kurt Spellmeyer in his article “After Theory,” had already solidified the project of the reclamation of the socialized individual subject (a diverse grouping of compositionists whom Michelle Baillif has labeled “revisionary expressivists” [“Seducing” 77]), and so Deleuze and Guattari’s work would be lumped in with other “so-called” postmodern and poststructural accounts of the death of the subject and treated as politically irresponsible, in spite of their many differences. For Worsham, such basic antinomies are a result of stances “‘for’ or ‘against’ theory [and are] both deeply divisive and, at this stage of [composition’s] development, rather beside the point” (“On” 390). Worsham’s proposal, instead of fighting about or over theory, is that we “study…what our appropriations [of ‘diverse and even dissonant array of discourses’] reveal about the enterprise of writing, about the pedagogy of the field” (“On” 390-1). Such a study, for Worsham, begins with an explicit renunciation of what she considers the popular and dominant view that understands composition as a field that “operates in an open, inclusive, non- hierarchical, and radically democratic way because it opposes a unifying, dominant discourse” (“On” 391). For Worsham, pedagogy is inherently suspect as “the general instructions a discipline issues, more or less explicitly, about what shall count as appropriate knowledge, instructions that express and safeguard the material and symbolic interests of the field, or the interests of the dominant group or groups that possess the power to set the terms of debate and discussion” (“On” 391). And to the extent that “theory” has become part of such a pedagogy, Worsham wants to practice what she calls a “a particular relation to theory—one that is critical, rhetorical, resistant and, ultimately, thoroughly theoretical….A rhetorical reading [that] allows us to move beyond the resistance to theory, which has been a persistent and recurring feature of our discourse, but it does so without making us theory’s unblinking constituents” (“On” 391). The aim of this chapter will be to explore how theory itself has become an implicit form of critique— replete with dangers, frustrations, and joys. In order to do that, I will explore Worsham’s critical response to T. R. Johnson’s article “Discipline and Pleasure: ‘Magic’ and Sound,” an article which criticizes an earlier Worsham article (“Emotion and Pedagogic Violence”).5 But what is
5 The texts involved in the Worsham/Johnson argument are numerous. Beginning with Johnson’s 1999 article “Discipline and Pleasure: ‘Magic’ and Sound,” as the starting point we can add Worsham’s 1992 article “Emotion and Pedagogic Violence” and its 1998 revision “Going Postal: Pedagogic Violence and the Schooling of Emotion,” as well as Worsham’s 1991 article on French feminist writing practices “Writing Against Writing: The Predicament of Ecriture Feminine in Composition Studies” as the primary texts involved in the dispute. As peripheral texts that have some bearing on the understanding of the argument as a whole we can add Worsham’s 1999 article “On the Rhetoric of Theory in the Discipline of Writing: A Comment and a Proposal” (which, interestingly, appeared in the 38 of most interest about the debate between Worsham and Johnson is that it marks a difference of agreement about subversive attempts to re-conceptualize composition studies. For what Worsham and Johnson have in common is an understanding of the role of composition studies as important in transforming the social and political conditions of the lives that move through the university system; what they disagree about is how such a transformation can and should take place. One of the concerns I have about this argument is about how two thinkers, seeking the same overall goals, can end up treating each other so meanly in their responses to one another. It occurs to me that this is part of the process of frustration Grossberg mentions earlier, a frustration that a turn to the work of Deleuze and Guattari might alleviate. Nobody Likes Being Made an Example Of Worsham begins her response to Johnson’s "Discipline and Pleasure" by offering a brief summary of his article. She begins by stating the basic claim or purpose of the article: Johnson seeks ‘a more precise and nuanced rendering of the particular pleasures of writing’ and a pedagogy adequate to those pleasures (438). He asserts that those of us who study and teach writing probably chose this profession as the result of some significant experience of the pleasures of writing, pleasures we seek to share with our students. Grounding his comments thus—in pleasure and experience—Johnson argues that we nonetheless have had difficulty taking pleasure seriously, as a serious subject of theory and pedagogy, because thought has been impeded, if not perilously foreclosed, by what he claims is a rather entrenched binary opposition between pleasure and discipline. This opposition, he observes, pervades thought not only in composition studies but also in critical theory, and it leads, he charges, to the suppression of writerly pleasures through a mistaken and anxious emphasis on teaching the discipline of conventional academic discourse as if it were the singular source of rhetorical power. (“Perilous” 707) I quote this summary in full because it will become important in the argument that Worsham wants to make about how one does critique in academic discourse, and how those conventions appropriate theory. She is using this summary as an example of how one is supposed to summarize. She does this because she feels that Johnson, who has chosen her article “Emotion and Pedagogic Violence” as an example of the “pervasive” binary opposition between pleasure and discipline, seriously misreads her argument and while suggesting that he must summarize her argument in more detail, Worsham accuses Johnson of serious decontextualization and misrepresentation of her argument and, in addition, he feels “no need to exercise a rhetorical sensibility” in relationship to his summary of her argument (“Perilous” 716). For Johnson’s part, he enters into discussion with Worsham’s article “Emotion and Pedagogic Violence” as a way to clear the ground for his dissolution of the pleasure and discipline binary. To begin with, as a sort of praise, he puts Worsham’s work within a context which she perhaps would not place it herself. This context is as one of the “many...who have begun to sound the call for a deeper understanding” of the issues surrounding the conflict between discipline and pleasure, and include extensions of Sondra Perl’s phenomenological arguments about “felt sense,” Victor Vitanza’s call to “vomit up” what we repress, namely desire, Jane Gallop’s erotic approach to the sexual pleasure inherent in teaching, and Stephen Katz’s exploration of affect in relation to “temporality and music theory” (“Discipline” 436). It is at this point that Johnson turns to Worsham’s article—by necessity he writes—as an article that he “must summarize in a little more detail” (“Discipline” 436). One thing that is clear is that
same issue of JAC as Johnson’s “Discipline and Pleasure”) and Johnson’s 2001 article “School Sucks.” I beg your indulgence, as this analysis requires me to jump from one of these articles to another in relatively quick succession. 39 Johnson focuses on Worsham’s article because it clearly does not do what the other critics he alludes to do. He is, to a certain extent, establishing a “straw (wo)man” of Worsham and her text. He begins with Worsham’s definition of emotion as “the tight braid of affect and judgment, socially constructed and lived bodily, through which the symbolic takes hold of and binds the individual, in complex and contradictory ways, to the social order and its structure of meanings” (“Discipline” 436, Worsham “Emotion” 121). In Johnson’s reading of Worsham, he insists that we read Worsham as “insist[ing] that we see violence as synonymous with pedagogy” because Worsham sees both the literal violence of everyday life and the symbolic violence of the school and workplace as shaping emotion (“Discipline” 436). He points out that part of Worsham’s endeavor is “to dissolve the relation between pedagogy and violence” (“Discipline” 436, Worsham “Emotion” 122). However, in place of an explanation of how Worsham proposes to do that, he launches into his critique of Worsham’s position on the varying pedagogies that are trying to rehabilitate notions of emotion in the classroom. Interestingly enough, the term Johnson uses to describe Worsham’s stance is “suspicious”: She is, however, most suspicious of those pedagogies that merely mask their inherent violence by pretending to be ‘decentered’ or ‘multi-cultural’ or ‘feminist’ or ‘expressive.’ Such pedagogies are not only egregiously deceptive, but, worse, they perpetuate the binary of emotion versus rationality, of pleasure versus the authoritative conventions that enable meaning…. In fact, Worsham is most suspicious of the attempt to think about pedagogy in terms of pleasure, desire, and the experience of empowerment: it smacks of the ‘feel-goodism’ and ‘sensitivity training’ by which contemporary industrial settings devalue and disarm the anger and bitterness that might otherwise form the seed-bed for social change; this facile ‘feel-goodism’ smacks too of the general waning-of-affect or birth-of-cool that Jameson associates with the oceanic commodification and consumerist sublime of advanced capital, and thus it panders directly to pop-culture markets that we should instead challenge and resist. (“Discipline” 436-7) The immediate question is why Johnson calls Worsham’s resistance to such pedagogies “suspicious.” The term “suspicious” has many immediate connotations that fill our understanding: if one is suspicious they are skeptical; if they are skeptical they are not affirmative; if they are not affirmative then they tear down without building up. More so, however, I think Johnson is about setting up lines of demarcation between the work he sees himself doing and the work he sees Worsham doing. Suspicion carries with it Paul Ricouer’s understanding of the reliance of contemporary critics to work under the aegis of a hermeneutics of suspicion. It was in this way that Ricouer characterized the major critics that influenced much of contemporary critical thought—Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud. For Ricoeur, however, these hermeneuts of suspicion are yoked to an additional idea of hope as he writes in Freud and Philosophy: “All three clear the horizon for a more authentic world, for a new reign of truth, not only by means of a destructive critique, but by the invention of an art of interpreting” (33). In short, the issue for Johnson is to challenge Worsham on her idea of critique which strikes him as being part and parcel of a one-dimensional hermeneutic of suspicion from which he wants to distance himself. Johnson is trying to announce himself as a radical thinker who is pushing the boundaries of our understanding of composition as far as they can go, critically and affirmatively.6
6 In addition we can’t separate this implicit critique of Worsham’s negative critique from Herbert Marcuse’s essay on “The Affirmative Character of Culture,” in which Marcuse raises suspicions about the influence of media on 40 It is at this point that Worsham is most concerned with Johnson’s uses of examples. She reads Johnson’s article as “a model of well disciplined scholarly argument…. an exemplary text” (“Perilous” 708). Of course, there is no way Johnson can take this claim by Worsham as anything more than a rhetorical slam disguised as flattery. While his whole agenda is to work outside the tradition of disciplinary convention, Worsham cogently points out that he is nonetheless working within that tradition. In “On the Rhetoric of Theory,” Worsham suggests that one way to begin a study of composition’s appropriation of theory is to follow the lead created by those working within the rhetoric of inquiry: An investigation of the logic and language of theory as a convention of scholarship in composition studies might take its initial instructions from the rhetoric of inquiry, an interdisciplinary field or movement that re-describes the humanities and social sciences in rhetorical terms—for example, through recurrent figures of research and argument; characteristic claims and warrants; conventional narratives of discovery; typical invocations of authority and appeals to audiences. (393) In her response to Johnson, Worsham creates such a rhetoric of theory informed by the “practice of exemplification.” She admits readily, and early on, that she chooses Johnson’s article because has made an example of her article. She also admits that a study of exemplification would have to take into account more texts than just Johnson’s, but because her purpose is “to be suggestive and, indeed, provocative rather than persuasive” she asks the audience’s “leave” to “fully develop and support my general argument at another time” (“Perilous” 708). Such direct address strikes me as a kind of asking forgiveness for what is going to happen next—a thorough and total dismantling of Johnson’s text, and by relation, unnamed texts that follow the same models of exemplification that Johnson does. First, though, Worsham offers a selective presentation and deconstruction of ideas of exemplification from Aristotle to the present. Worsham begins by pointing out that the use of examples in “contemporary scholarly argument is ubiquitous and is so ubiquitous that it demonstrates to some degree the common sense of scholarly argument—hence it often goes “unnoticed and unexamined in our thought about thinking” (708). Now this is a specific move in contemporary poststructural critical discourse, as well as in most forms of ideology critique.7 Articulating her move as such, Worsham puts herself in the position of the demystifier of contemporary practices of exemplification. This is also the project at the heart of Johnson’s “Discipline and Punish”: to demystify the contemporary practices that reduce pleasure to an after-thought in contemporary composition studies. Worsham first demystifies the concept of example by recourse to Aristotle, pointing out how Aristotle claimed that, along with enthymeme, example is “one of two general modes of persuasion, as one of two general disciplines of thought for matters about which there can be no absolute certainty” (“Perilous” 709). Second she turns to the work of Scott Consigny, who describes the purpose of example as “reasoning from part to part…as a ‘lens’ or ‘screen’ through which to impose an order on or give structure to a situation, experience, or text,
popular culture that operates through modes of affirmation. Johnson is clearly working against and around the kind of ideology critique established by the Frankfurt School and of which he sees Worsham as being part. 7 One need only consider Foucault’s discussion of “the repressive hypothesis” in the History of Sexuality, Part 1, or Derrida’s critique of speech as the guarantor of presence in Of Grammatology. In terms of ideology critique the classic text, after of course Marx’s critique of capital, is Barthes’ essay “Myth Today” which shows the ubiquity of myth as the ideological underpinning of western culture. There are numerous other examples to mention, but two of feminist interest would be Gayle Rubin’s “The Traffic in Women” and Michelle Le Doeuff’s The Philosophical Imaginary, a critique of imagery at work in western philosophical discourse. As such, these critiques all have in common the demystification of embedded social practices. 41 foregrounding some aspects and minimizing or ignoring others, and thereby telling us in what direction to think, while charging our thought with crucial emotional valences” (“Perilous” 709). Third, Worsham cites John Lyon’s understanding of example: ‘Example is so central to systems of belief that we occasionally think of it as the direct manifestation of reality when, in fact, example is a way of taking our beliefs about reality and reframing them into something that suits the direction of a text.’ Lyons goes on to conclude that for this reason example may qualify as ‘the most ideological of figures, in the sense of being the figure that is most intimately bound to a representation of the world and that most serves as a veil for the mechanics of that representation.’ (“Perilous” 709, emphasis added by Worsham). For Worsham, the important point is that an example “does just not happen; it is not found. It is always made, crafted. The selection of an example is at once its creation. A principal conceptual instrument, a cunning mode of advocacy, example is surely a perilous act” (“Perilous” 709). The reference to a “perilous act” comes from an epigraph from Michel Foucault that Worsham uses partly to identify her primary concerns in her article, and also partly to set off, in a case of dueling epigraphs by the same author, against an epigraph by Foucault with which Johnson begins his article. Worsham’s epigraph reads: Thought is no longer theoretical. As soon as it functions it offends or reconciles, attracts or repels, breaks, dissociates, unites or reunites; it cannot help but liberate and enslave. Even before prescribing, suggesting a future, saying what must be done, even before exhorting or merely sounding an alarm, thought, at the level of its existence, in its very dawning, is itself an action—a perilous act. (“Perilous” 707) Clearly, Worsham’s endeavor here is to create a link between Foucault’s description of thought and her understanding of example. Example, like thought, is always motivated and exceedingly complicated. I will discuss this epigraph in more detail later. For the moment it is important to discuss how it is that example operates, according to Worsham. Worsham sees example as operating in two specific directions: vertically and horizontally; these vertical and horizontal movements constitute what Worsham calls the “discursive micropolitics” of exemplification. All of this she derives, again, from Lyons’ definition of example: “‘An example is a dependent statement qualifying a more general and independent statement by naming a member of the class established by the general statement. An example cannot exist without (a) a general statement and (b) an indication of this subordinate status’” (“Perilous” 710, emphasis added by Worsham). From this general definition Worsham draws several conclusions: first, example has no “autonomous standing” because it cannot “exist independently of its relation to a general statement”; second, example “functions as a vector pointing to a principle or conclusion for which it serves as support”; third, if the example is heightened as either an “exemplar, a model or a paradigm, the vector points back to a source (Plato’s Ideal forms, for example)”; fourth, this pointing to a source either of origin or end creates a “vertical dimension to thought or to a text” that “inscribes dominant and subordinate relations between statements” (“Perilous” 710). It is the particular process of these developing relations of dominance and subordination that point out the discursive micropolitics of exemplification. Worsham gives three examples of how this vertical movement of exemplification works in relation to literary studies, critical theory and composition studies. For my purposes here her example of critical theory is most pertinent. Worsham writes: “The work of theory in the
42 humanities is, in large part, a labor of exemplification that makes the object text subordinate to the general principle or conclusion to be illustrated, proved, dramatized, demystified, or deconstructed—for example, logocentrism (and its operative principle of binary opposition), patriarchy, or the political unconscious” (“Perilous” 710). This highlights Worsham’s specific mode of critique; she recognizes that critique always operates from the position which it is in. That is to say, critique is always caught up within its own object; therefore, one cannot offer a critique without always offering a critique of his or her own critique. This will be a difference between Worsham and Johnson that I will discuss in more detail later as it bears significantly on their dueling epigraphs. In addition to a vertical dimension, Worsham also claims that example operates on a horizontal relation. While the vertical relation attends to transcendent issues like origins and ends, the horizontal relation attends to the issue of “a reader or audience for whom the example has been selected and prepared” (“Perilous” 711). The horizontal relationship operates in two ways: first, the horizontal relation creates a “promise” to readers that even though one member of a class has been selected as an example, “there are others waiting offstage”; second, Worsham turns to Lyons again to draw a relationship between example and quotation as a “cut” from one context that is put into another, the purpose of which is “to cut—to create or demarcate—a possible common ground that may be shared by writer and reader, speaker and audience” (“Perilous” 711). As such it is not only important that examples are used to create contact, but it is just as important to recognize when examples are not used; as Worsham puts it we “would do well, then, to pay close attention to where exemplification does not happen” (“Perilous” 711). Worsham draws her discussion of exemplification to a close by drawing on a second epigraph to her article from Edmund Burke which reads “Example is the school of mankind, and they will learn at no other.” She couples this with the earlier quoted epigraph from Foucault to suggest “that example is a school for thought”: More precisely stated, exemplification does not serve to liberate thought or to proscribe or enslave it; example is an act of thought liberating or enslaving itself. Typically working its discursive magic out in the open, right under our noses, quietly, without calling much attention to itself, example works in much the same way ideology works. In fact, it is ideology at work in a most familiar, everyday, and pervasive form. Scholarly writing—which, to my way of thinking, should aspire to be an exemplar of the most thoughtful writing—should therefore strive to become the kind of writing that constantly and continuously puts ideology in peril. (“Perilous” 711-12) For Worsham, the recognition of the relation between ideology and example creates the necessity for examining how contemporary scholars use example. She insists that there be “an ethics of exemplification” and “an ethics of scholarship” and that “one criterion for judging scholarly writing” be the thoughtful use of example. With this criterion in place, Worsham begins her critique of Johnson’s use of exemplification in earnest. Leading by Example, with Your Chin Worsham limits her discussion of the perils of exemplification as they appear in Johnson’s argument to the practices of decontextualization and misrepresentation. She is concerned with demonstrating the responsibility a scholar has in their use of exemplification. Worsham writes: If what is happening in exemplification is the representation of reality (or a state of affairs) through a reframing that suits the direction of one’s text, then to what existent is the scholar writer responsible for minimizing this distance and this difference of direction
43 through his/her selection of examples. To what extent does the original (con)text limit the selection and deployment of a potential example or call for some qualification of its use? When a scholar-writer isolates an element from its original context, what is lost that complicates or contradicts the general statement for which the example serves as support? Given the constraints imposed by the new (con)text, how much of the former con(text) should be imported into the new (con)text to fairly present the example and represent its original (con)text? (“Perilous” 712-3) Worsham suggests that by understanding more fully the two dimensions of exemplification, vertical and horizontal, a writer would be able to “adjudicate between [the] competing interests” of “the interest of his/her argument” and “the interests of a scholarly community” (“Perilous” 713). It is at this point that Worsham demonstrates the perils of exemplification by using Johnson’s article as “an example.” Worsham begins by noting absences in Johnson’s use of examples to establish the binary between discipline and pleasure that he locates in contemporary critical discourse. She notes that Johnson relies on an example from Henry Giroux from more than twenty years ago failing to pursue any more recent commentary Giroux may have made about the issue at hand, and she notes that Johnson doesn’t discuss the most exemplary text on the idea of discipline, Foucault’s Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, at all. The first peril, and one that while significant is not so dangerous, then occurs around the issue of “whether it is fair, in creating an example, to completely elide reference, especially more recent or comprehensive work, by the same author which might complicate, contradict, or even support that general statement that requires exemplification” (713). For Worsham, such an occurrence of “elision” is an example of “self-interest” serving as “an appropriate warrant for the decisions one necessarily must make in doing scholarly writing” (713). The list of curious absences could be extended even farther. Johnson avoids completely, for example, Teresa Ebert’s critique of “ludic” theories, most of which are based on models of pleasure. In addition, he doesn’t even come close to mentioning Barry Sanders’ Sudden Glory: Laughter as Subversive History, or many other texts which could bear on the issue of the binary between discipline and pleasure. As an example, Johnson cites Deleuze and Guattari a number of times throughout his essay, and yet he still holds on to the idea of discipline even after Deleuze has suggested we have already moved out of the carceral society into what Deleuze calls “societies of control.”8 In a second example, one that Worsham deems a “more serious aspect of decontextualization and (mis)representation,” Johnson is taken to task for his use of Jane Gallop’s “erotic pedagogy” without addressing the dangers of such a pedagogy. Worsham writes: “The silence in Johnson’s text—about the actual consequences of Gallop’s pedagogy and, more generally, about the potential dangers of an erotic pedagogy—breaks the contact that example can so usefully establish between (this) reader and the text may seriously damage the possibility of being persuasive” (“Perilous” 714). Worsham generalizes this problem in the use of the Gallop example in terms of how “desire leads to repression”; Johnson is seen as repressing specific aspects of context in order to pursue his own desire, in this case a pleasure-centered pedagogy. Worsham’s example of Gallop is easy because the mess created by Gallop’s experiments with an erotics of teaching was so public and so embarrassing for many of the
8 See Deleuze “Postscript on Societies of Control” in Negotiations. Deleuze’s argument is that power no longer organizes itself according to particular places like the school, factory, and prison. In the control society, one no longer needs organizations to control life; life controls itself, and one way it does so is through the codification of practices of pleasure. 44 participants. However, it is important to point out that Johnson is interested in establishing a tradition within which he places his concerns about the ideas of pleasure and discipline. Besides Gallop, he lists the work of Sondra Perl, Victor Vitanza, and Stephen Katz as exploring pleasure in a positive light in composition studies. Worsham deals with none of these thinkers in her critical response, and we could ask of her the same question she asks of Johnson: Is it her desire to make a point so important that she represses these other telling examples? However, we must also recognize the limited space for her response and that, especially after her discussion of the concept of exemplification, she has some purpose related to the notion of example, for choosing the Gallop example to make an example of. Worsham’s third example is the example of her own article, “Emotion and Pedagogic Violence” which Johnson critiques as an example of the discipline and pleasure binary. Worsham begins her discussion by questioning Johnson’s choice to rely on “Emotion and Pedagogic Violence” instead of her more recent 1998 revision of the article “Going Postal: Pedagogic Violence and the Schooling of Emotion.” Her claim again is that Johnson decontextualizes and misrepresents the positions developed in the articles. The context for those articles is Worsham’s concern over the move in humanities-based scholarship to issues of pedagogy in the late eighties and nineties, and I would add, that pedagogy is still booming today, having moved beyond the boundaries of the humanities.9 Worsham’s concern is motivated by two primary factors: first, the move to pedagogy is curious “given the fact that the devaluation of composition studies has been secured by our association with the practical and pedagogical”; and second, desire and pleasure have become “a major strand of thought in literary and cultural studies at a time, the 1990s, when instances of school and workplace violence have grown more frequent and more deadly” (“Perilous” 715). Worsham’s primary point here is that Johnson is creating a lack where there is not one; or, as Richard Rorty used to be fond of saying about foundationalist and totalizing philosophies, scratching where it does not itch. Beyond that, however, Worsham charges Johnson with “feel[ing] no need to exercise a rhetorical sensibility—a sense of what the reader may need in terms of background and contextualization” (“Perilous” 716). This leaves Worsham with the inability to recognize her own thoughts as her own. For example, Johnson starts with the explicit claim that What shapes emotion, argues Worsham, is violence—both the literal violence that occurs within families and on the street, and the usually more symbolic varieties of the workplace and the classroom. Worsham insists that we see violence as synonymous with pedagogy, both being a sort of ritual scarification by which the dominant discourses ‘maintain and reinforce the reigning social, economic, [and] political arrangements as legitimate when in fact they are entirely arbitrary.’ (Worsham “Emotion” 124, Johnson “Discipline” 436, my emphasis10) The question that is paramount is whether there is anything in Worsham’s article that can be read the way Johnson sees it. To begin with, in “Emotion and Pedagogic Violence,” Worsham is after
9 A simple search of any of the major databases in academia and beyond will reveal the turn to pedagogy in disciplines as diverse as mathematics and corporate organization. Ultimately I will argue later in this chapter that this is a sign of the movement towards the aforementioned “control society.” While Deleuze’s understanding of the control society is formed relatively recently, its impetus can be construed in Michelle Le Doeuff’s diagnosis of the philosophical imaginary as partly constructed by the desire for “self-foundation” and “self-validation” which becomes a motivated auto-didactic relationship of self to self. In contemporary capitalism, although Le Doeuff does not make this point, pedagogy related to such issues of self-foundation, self-validation, and auto-didacticism have great currency. 10 To save space I have placed Worsham’s citations of Johnson in italics and am citing from Johnson’s text. 45 constructing a rhetoric of pedagogic violence much in the same way that she argues for a rhetoric of theory. Here is how Worsham describes such a rhetoric: A rhetoric of pedagogic violence will focus specifically on the way violence addresses and educates emotion and inculcates an affective relation to the world. In the view I develop here, emotion will refer to the tight braid of affect and judgment, socially constructed and lived bodily, through which the symbolic takes hold of and binds the individual, in complex and contradictory ways, to the social order and its structure of meanings. School, workplace, and family violence are in fact pedagogies of emotion, no less effective in locating us in a way of life than what we typically consider instruments for educating emotion such as marriage, parenthood, and media. As such, they are part of the political machinery of what Ann Ferguson has called the sex/affective production system of advanced capitalism and arise from within and extend (rather than radically destabilize) its logic. (“Emotion” 121-2) Clearly, for Worsham, pedagogic violence is a type of violence; however, she does not once announce that pedagogy be construed as synonymous with violence. Rather, and what is more important, pedagogical violence is structured in much the same way other forms of violence are structured. In addition, Worsham never claims that emotion is only shaped by violence; she merely claims that in a rhetoric of pedagogic violence the primary issue is how violence shapes emotion. Johnson has, then, misrepresented Worsham’s text. Let us take another example. Worsham takes the time to develop the point of her discussion of a rhetoric of pedagogic violence: In this paper, I want to return to what I think we know but learn to forget—that the discourse of emotion is our primary education (primary in the sense of earliest and foundational). And I argue that if our commitment is to real individual and social change—a change that would finally dissolve the relationship between pedagogy and violence—then their work of decolonization must occur at the affective level, not only to reconstitute the emotional life of the individual but also, and more importantly, to restructure the feeling or mood that characterizes an age. To be sure, our most urgent political and pedagogical task remains the fundamental reeducation of emotion—a reconstruction, really, that cannot succeed by mapping a new regime of meaning onto an old way of feeling, one that has only intensified with the so called ‘waning-of-affect’ in the era of the postmodern. Face to face with the indomitable and archaic spirit of sex- hatred and race-hatred, for example, critical social theories help to shape our understanding, yet our emotional constitution holds sway so deeply that it retains an immunity to the legislative efforts of social critique and the legislative gains of progressive social movements. (“Emotion” 122) About this, Johnson writes the following: “Worsham argues that we must somehow ‘dissolve the relation between pedagogy and violence’ by turning our attention to the nuances of the affective domain” (“Discipline” 436). This is clearly an example of a drastic reduction of one thinker’s thought through elision. Such an elision confounds a number of issues: the agency of the action, the object of the action, and the goal of the action. Why would Johnson perform such a “hatchet job” on the text of another author? Is his motivation merely self-interest as Worsham would have it, or is there more at stake? Missing The Point The next example that Worsham gives, because of her own practice of elision, as well as Johnson’s practice of extreme selectivity in examples, demonstrates what is really at stake in the
46 arguments both are developing: the point of critique in contemporary composition scholarship. After Worsham points out Johnson’s reduction of her argument about the purpose of a rhetoric of pedagogic violence, she continues detailing his use of her work as an example. Worsham writes: But, as [Johnson] immediately points out, Worsham is not only suspicious of, she condemns any pedagogy ‘rooted in pleasure (and, more broadly, emotion, desire, experience, and empowerment) as distinct from another pedagogy rooted in critique, resistance, and a more authentic recognition of the universality of violence’ ([Johnson “Discipline”] 437). Then [Johnson] makes the confounding assertion: We can produce the more nuanced understanding of pleasure and empowerment for which Worsham appeals, and we can partly undo the relation between pedagogy and violence, but only if we accept as working premises, first, Foucault’s insight…that asks us to surrender convenient binaries like ‘inside/outside’ and ‘empowerment/ resistance’ and, second, Kristeva’s notion that the lived experience of social change is orgasmic. ([Johnson “Discipline”] 438, emphasis added [by Worsham]) Now, I have no problem with surrendering binary oppositions. I remember signing on to this project years ago, knowing as I do that there is a difference between binary thinking and making distinctions, even distinctions framed as oppositions. (Not all oppositions are necessarily binary oppositions, and I’d challenge thought to move forward without hazarding a few distinctions between this and that and, for that matter, a third and fourth thing.) Perhaps you can imagine, then, my alarm when I see my critical commentary on both pedagogies of empowerment and pedagogies of resistance represented as another example of the kind of thinking that ultimately keeps us within ‘the debilitating binary logic of ‘‘us versus them’’([“Discipline”] 437). (“Perilous” 716-7) Worsham’s concern goes beyond the mere misrepresentation of her text here; she has a general concern for the kind of scholarship that is at work. As she points out through emphasizing Johnson’s text, she has a concern about the way all distinctions can become questioned as binary oppositions without regard for the kinds of distinctions they are. In addition, to her mind, the connection between “surrendering convenient binaries” and the subsequent premise about “lived experience of social change is orgasmic” needs to be made, not merely proffered. Finding Johnson’s premise about orgasmic pleasure “the most disturbing feature of Johnson’s practice of exemplification,” Worsham opens up her critique: It insists on pleasure as the inner logic and experience of persuasion and of individual and social change (‘the lived experience of social change is orgasmic’). In the final analysis, Johnson recommends pleasure as an end in itself and encourages a rather uncritical relation to pleasure and its politics. Moreover, his practice of exemplification directs attention away from the possibility that our goal should always be to render our students and ourselves more prone to thought, even to thoughts that are not always entirely pleasant or pleasurable. (“Perilous” 718, emphasis in original) The point for Worsham is that Johnson’s announcement of the premise about orgasmic pleasure has no support. As she says, she wants “Johnson to move out of the heady world of theory and myth and move into the concrete world of example” (“Perilous” 718). It is because of this that Worsham calls this particular “stipulation” by Johnson “nonsense” and because he “asks us to accept it as a working premise and without any visual support—without thought—makes it dangerous nonsense” (“Perilous” 718, emphasis in original). For Worsham, what Johnson leaves behind is the micropolitics of lived experience; the way that experience politicizes and
47 helps to maintain practices of pleasure and violence. Worsham maintains that Johnson’s exemplar of orgasmic pleasure leaves a lot of people behind: “racial, sexual, and ethnic minorities; the economically exploited; women; children” (“Perilous” 718). The lived experience of social change for these people Worsham describes as being “more aptly and more often described in terms associated with violence rather than pleasure—for example, as quiet tedium, dazed apathy, daily anger, seething silence, (self-)destructive rage, stunned fear, visible humiliation, crushing shame, burning hatred, and too much suffering, even suffering unto death” (“Perilous” 718). To Worsham’s concern I would add another concern, the example of “unsolicited oppositional discourse” which Richard E. Miller documents in his article “Fault Lines in the Contact Zone.” In that article, Miller reports on a student who writes about an experience of “gay-bashing.” Miller describes the paper as being conceived in and describing the pleasure of the experience. For Miller, the question was how does one respond to such a text. It strikes me that Johnson’s focus on pleasure would have to attend to the issues of style in the text: how does the text create pleasure for the reader, how does it turn violence into pleasure. Worsham’s concern over the ethics of scholarship here broadens to a larger concern about ethics in general. In order to be fair to Johnson, it is important that we turn Worsham’s method back on her own reading of Johnson. So, for example, is her reading of Johnson’s text also suffering from the dangers of exemplarity? Let us take Worsham’s example of Johnson’s two premises described above. This is the point in Johnson’s article wherein he is trying to establish the necessity of purpose for his position. Johnson is concerned with how teachers and theorists of composition “meet the pleasures of writing with a certain suspicion” (“Discipline” 431). He diagnoses this suspicion as deriving from our need “to familiarize students not with their own inwardly felt flashes of inspiration but with the public conventions that enable successful communication” (“Discipline” 431). This familiarizing of students with public conventions, Johnson labels “disciplining,” and he suggests that it “proceeds as the suppression of the immediate particular pleasures of composing, a figurative casting off of the smaller, individual body where such pleasures register, so that one may ascend to the real source of rhetorical power, the larger communal body of conventional discourse” (“Discipline” 431). His emphasis on the personal “nature” of pleasure as in opposition to the communal “nature” of discipline marks a clear line in what will follow. Johnson is interested in rehabilitating a notion of personal expression, but instead of working it from the traditional angle of the coherent, interiorized subject, he wants to pursue personal expression from within a contemporary theoretical perspective that challenges such conceptions of the subject. The question is why Johnson chooses Worsham to make an example of? Indeed, it strikes me that someone like Teresa Ebert creates a more central challenge to his position on pleasure than does Worsham. Worsham is just as interested as Johnson is in reconstructing the old binaries that close off thought in composition studies. In order to figure this out, we must turn to Johnson’s description of the purpose for his arguments about pleasure, what happens in between Worsham’s citation of Johnson on page 716 about the condemnation of any pedagogy rooted in pleasure and the citation on page 717 about Worsham falling into a “debilitating logic of ‘us versus them.’” Worsham has broken up a continuous paragraph, for the purposes of her exemplification. In that paragraph Johnson writes: To condemn, however, a pedagogy rooted in pleasure (and, more broadly, emotion, desire, experience, and empowerment) as distinct from another pedagogy rooted in critique, resistance and amore authentic recognition of the universality of violence is to
48 neglect, I think, the point that Foucault makes in the epigraph above: critique and resistance, like transgression, are made possible only by the disciplinary regimes they pretend to target; and therefore the affirmation of experience of these discourse-machines is a necessary and perhaps more trustworthy first-step in transforming them and us, in delivering ourselves from the debilitating, binary logic of ‘us versus them.’ (“Discipline” 437) Johnson’s point, here, is about the nature of critique, about what one should do once one recognizes that critique is parasitic on the practices it targets. For Johnson, this means a model of critique as affirmation, and not resistance, is the best “first-move” transforming “them and us.” He derives this understanding from his own Foucault epigraph to his article, which reads: Transgression…is not related to the limit as black to white, the prohibited to the lawful, the outside to the inside, or as the open area of a building to its enclosed spaces. Rather, their relationship takes the form of a spiral that no simple infraction can exhaust. [T]ransgression is the solar inversion of satanic denial. This citation is taken from Foucault’s 1963 essay “A Preface to Transgression.” Foucault’s essay is a celebration of the thought of Georges Bataille, one of the precursors to many of the ideas that helped to create what we know today as poststructuralism. Within that essay, Foucault elaborates many of the concerns that create what I will call a counter-tradition within composition studies, and with which Johnson clearly identifies. These concerns include shifting values around issues of affirmation over resistance, non-dialectical methods over dialectical methods, and a concern for issues of existence over issues of knowing. For example, in the paragraph after the first part of the epigraph by Johnson, Foucault writes: Since this existence [of the experience of transgression] is both so pure and so complicated, it must be detached from its questionable association to ethics if we want to understand it and to begin thinking from it and the space it denotes; it must be liberated from the scandalous or subversive, that is from anything aroused by negative associations. Transgression does not seek to oppose one thing to another, nor does it achieve its purpose through mockery or upsetting the solidity of foundations…. Transgression is neither violence in a divided world (in an ethical world) nor a victory over limits (in a dialectical or revolutionary world); and exactly for this reason, its role is to measure the excessive distance that it opens at the heart of the limit and to trace the flashing line that causes the limit to arise. Transgression contains nothing negative, but affirms limited being—affirms the limitlessness into which it leaps as it opens this zone to existence for the first time. But correspondingly, this affirmation contains nothing positive: no content can bind it, since, by definition, no limit can possibly restrict it. Perhaps it is simply an affirmation of division, but only insofar as division is not understood to mean a cutting gesture, or the establishment of a separation or the measuring of distance, only retaining that in it which may designate the existence of difference. (“Preface” 35-6) Worsham offsets Johnson’s epigraph with her own epigraph which I have cited above. Her choice of epigraph is telling: it is in itself an epigraph to the edited collection Language, Counter-memory, Practice within which “A Preface to Transgression” is the first article. Her point is two-fold: first, her epigraph about the importance of acts over theory is primary to Johnson’s epigraph about transgression; second, Johnson seems resolutely unaware of the “perilous act” involved in his use of language. Johnson, however, is clearly aware of what he is doing. The problem is that his
49 explanation of what he is doing is left to the reader. For him, the connection between the Foucault premise and the Kristeva premise is apparent in “A Preface to Transgression.” Here is the paragraph that comes between the paragraph cited above about transgression and the paragraph that announces the two premises Worsham has so much trouble with. Johnson writes: We can gain, in fact, precisely what Worsham asks us to develop: a much more nuanced understanding of emotion in general and the pleasures of empowerment in particular, one that runs much deeper than the facile ‘feel-goodism’ that Worsham rightly decries. As Worsham argues via Kristeva, subject-formation in general and learning in particular often unfold as a violent repudiation of the maternal, a horrified recoiling as the abject absence of symbols with which to mark our origins. But I think Kristeva, too, would argue that important experiences with language take the form of a radical desubjectification, a jouissance which breaks up the structures that contain the subject and allows them to reconstitute themselves a moment later in slightly different form. Kristeva links this ecstatic process to revolution, and such a process is not wholly different from critique. Given the awesome forces of advanced capital and consumer culture, this process may be, at least at this stage, the most we can realistically hope to encourage in classrooms. (“Discipline” 437-8) The question is why does not this count as an example? Because it is not. Rather it is the other kind of “general mode of persuasion”: an enthymeme. As Aristotle describes it, the enthymeme is a “rhetorical syllogism” and is guided not by necessary truth but probability, or contingent truth (Rhetoric 42). As a kind of syllogism, Aristotle immediately compares the enthymeme to the dialectical syllogism: Since the persuasive is persuasive to someone (and is either immediately plausible and believable in itself or seems to be shown by statements that are so) and since no art examines the particular—for example, the art of medicine does not specify what is healthful for Socrates or Callias but for persons of a certain sort (this is artistic, while particulars are limitless and not knowable)—neither does rhetoric theorize about each opinion—what may seem so to Socrates or Hippias—but about what seems true to people of a certain sort, as is also true with dialectic. For the latter does not form syllogisms from things at random (some things seem true even to madmen) but from that [which seems true] to people in need of argument, and rhetoric [forms enthymemes] from things [that seem true] to people already accustomed to deliberate among themselves. (Rhetoric 41) To read Johnson’s premises as enthymemes allows one to give a more favorable response to them, but only if the audience is willing to accept them as probable, and only if the audience is willing to accept Foucault’s “A Preface to Transgression” as the warrant for the premises. Two questions follow from this: first, if Worsham is not the intended audience, and she most clearly is not, then who is; second, what should we think about the use of an epigraph as the warrant for a whole host of claims or premises while the epigraph remains largely unexplained within the context of the piece? The answers to these questions are, not surprisingly, yoked together. They have to do with how theory has taken over for critique in many instances of alternative constructions of composition, alternatives informed by two distinctive approaches to theory as critique in contemporary composition: the affirmative approach and the resistance approach.11 The Counter-Tradition in Composition: The Production of Dissensus
11 I will point out right now that these two separate approaches do not constitute a binary; they are only different kinds of critical practice. 50 The audience for Johnson’s article are those writers he affirms as doing the kind of work on the issue of pleasure that he valorizes: Sondra Perl, Victor Vitanza, Jane Gallop, and Stephen Katz. In addition, there are a host of other people Johnson cites favorably that strike him as part of his audience (Peter Elbow, Joseph Harris) and some he cites negatively that clearly are not (David Bartholomae, Henry Giroux, and Worsham). The point of his article is not persuasion; his point is theorizing and describing alternative pedagogies. As Johnson describes his purpose, we should see that The teaching of writing has always been a site of struggle, a jumble of competing epistemologies, methods, and goals, and while this may have contributed to our being kept in the cellar for generations, we have thus been free to grow, change, and perhaps most importantly, make bold claims about our relevance to worlds outside the academy, about our power to alter the lives of students as rhetorical agents, our power to “turn them on” intellectually--or off. Therefore we are in a special position to lead our colleagues, as Joseph Harris argues, away from the question of discipline (‘what it is that we do’) and into the question of how different pedagogies create different experiences for our students and what these experiences mean. (“Discipline” 433, emphasis in original) In sum, Johnson wants to be done with issues of disciplinarity in order to push the field ahead. Hence, his purpose is not argumentation at all. His purpose is to articulate different pedagogies that he feels have not been tried before and using those pedagogies to push the theoretical and practical agenda of composition to new heights. This idea of working outside of traditional models of argumentation in order to create a perspective is not new to composition studies. In a move that solidifies Johnson’s relationship to a particular audience, and a particular discourse community,12 this particular strategy of presentation is outlined by Victor Vitanza in his article “Three Countertheses: Or, A Critical In(ter)vention into Composition Theories and Pedagogies.” Vitanza operates within a context of what he calls a “perverse comedy” as “a meditative questioning of the ‘status quo’ (139). For Vitanza, such a questioning is not an attack, but what he calls a “critical in(ter)vention”: It is both critical and an intervention here in that uncanny criticisms will be deployed heuristically with the sole purpose of establishing the (postmodern) conditions for the possibilities of discourse in and about writing theory and pedagogy that, heretofore, the field of composition has had to disallow…. Perverse comedy is an attempt at a discourse, therefore, that requires itself to bear witness to what has been disallowed by searching for comedic counteridioms that will allow, that will enable. (139-40) In order to create such a discourse, Vitanza sets up three positive theses that mark the status quo of composition studies, and then creates three counter-theses to challenge them. For our purposes here, it is counterthesis one that is most important. As Vitanza puts it, counterthesis one “(de)centers on the age old issue of whether knowledge can be legitimized or grounded either on some universal, ontogenetic theory (that is on some universal law, or physis) or rhetorically on consensus theory (that is, on homology or local nomoi)” (145). As a consequence of such a challenge, argumentation as a procedure comes into question: A corollary to this counterthesis is that argumentation, which is based on a variety of
12 This discourse community of “alternative” scholars gets its start with Victor Vitanza but includes a diverse variety of critics and theorists like Johnson, Michelle Baillif, D. Diane Davis, Bruce Horner, Min-Zhan Lu, Alan W. France, Joseph Harris, to name only a few. In spite of their many differences, what marks this group as a discourse community is their endeavor to create an affirmative model of critique over a resistance model of critique. I will discuss this in more detail in the following section. 51 (apparent) legitimation principles that we call warrants (according to Toulmin), grand narratives (according to Lyotard), and representative anecdotes (according to Burke) and which has as its goal rational consensus (or hermeneutic understanding), is questionable and, therefore, problematic; so called rational consensus…is seen by Lyotard and Deleuze and Guattari suspiciously as political oppression. Commonplaces have an insidious way of only fostering the dominant discourse; commonplaces are in no way revolutionary. What we desire instead of political-argumentative discourse (either dialectics/didactics or argumentation), what we desire instead of politics, then, is rhizomatic-‘polylectics,’ or radical multiplicities, as means of resistance. (151-2) What is involved in this “rhizomatic-‘polylectics’” is a process of disruption of “traditional and modern rhetoric(s)”; a process marked by an investment in multiple voices, in disjunctive leaps across many discourses, in a suspicious account of any claims to truth based on transcendent rules (whether of God, nature, or the individual subject) or on any account of consensus. It is a model of linkage that has been taken up today most readily by theorists of hypertext. At the cornerstone of this process, also, is a challenge to models of discourse that rely on the positionality of the rhetor—in the rhizomatic response to traditional rhetorics, one can never fully be positioned; one is, and for Vitanza one should, always be working in-between the linkages. Resistance, in this model, is the resistance to any kind of positioning that could possible lead to consensus: dissensus is the goal of such “rhizomatic’-polylectic linkage. It is important to establish Johnson’s work in a line of trajectory that explains, to a certain extent, why he would be so dismissive of Worsham’s text. His aim, like Vitanza’s, is a radical transformation of the field of composition. He wants to “bear witness to what has been disallowed,” as Vitanza would put it, to offset the dominant idiom of discipline with the counteridiom of pleasure. Traditional models of critique and argumentation get in the way of his desire to affirm the difference of his model. He sees himself not as defending a position, but as constituting a practice. In fact, it seems clear that by allying himself with Vitanza over and against someone like David Bartholomae, he is reacting against the idea of positioning altogether. This creates a clear link with the tradition of Vitanza and others who have taken up Vitanza’s work, the best case being the work of Michelle Baillif. In her article, “Seducing Composition: A Challenge to Identity-Disclosing Pedagogies,” Baillif is interested in examining the responses to the “problem of the subject” that have created part of the influx of theory in composition studies. In probably what is the best single paragraph synopsis of the problem I have found in composition studies13, Bailiff clearly marks the limits of subjectivity in relation to composition: Many recent composition scholars—in the name of critical pedagogy—have posited personal experience, personal narratives, and identity politics as the means to construct a writing classroom that would foster a state of mutual understanding and tolerance, encourage a liberation of subjectivity, and provide a pharmakon against the supposed ideological impasse of postmodernism regarding the subject’s agency. The claim is that if one identifies with one’s subject position and discloses it, one achieves the authority to speak and/or write as ______(fill in the blank, e.g., woman, man, hetero, homo, black, Chinese, member of working class, member of privileged class). This pedagogical and theoretical claim, engendered by the combined registers of feminism, political theory,
13 Outside of composition studies I would suggest Nikolas Rose’s Inventing the Personal as the most comprehensive endeavor to deal with the problematic of the subject in all of its manifestations, but with particular attention paid to what Rose calls the Psy-disciplines: psychology, sociology, social-psychology, anthropology, and so forth. 52 critical theory, and literacy studies, takes as its conceptual starting point the political contestation of identity. This starting point, this now well-rehearsed argument regarding ‘the problem of the subject,’ presupposes that the overlapping categories of ‘identity,’ ‘agency,’ are ideological constructions that serve particular power/knowledge matrices, as argued by such theoretically diverse thinkers as Michel Foucault and Louis Althusser. (76-7) Baillif is, already, providing the reader with a feeling of her take on this issue when she describes such turns to personal disclosure as a “pharmakon,” the term Derrida famously teases out of the Phaedrus as implicating both cure and poison. In addition, Baillif presents herself as an equal opportunity demystifier taking on “all comers” in the debate over the problem of the subject. But most importantly, she inaugurates the real conditions which make such interventions by Vitanza, Johnson, and herself seemingly necessary: when she describes the “problem of the subject” as a “by now well-rehearsed argument,” there is a tone of exhaustion over what has now become, perhaps as Vitanza would call it, a commonplace in composition studies. Baillif continues: The ‘subject’ is thus constituted as a speaking-thinking-writing-voting being only insofar as it has been properly subjected by/through those matrices (i.e. normalized). Because this subjectivity (which has been historically constructed in terms of a phallic logic of noncontradiction, presence and selfsame identity) has effectively (and yet dubiously) privileged (economically, politically, and rhetorically) a particular few, while effectively marginalizing all others, postmodern theorists have sought to deconstruct the modern subject, to demonstrate how this stable, self-identical subject is a powerful fantasy of the Enlightenment. Composition theorists as diverse as Susan Miller…Lester Faigley…David Bartholomae…and Victor Vitanza, for example have addressed ‘the problem of the subject,’ particularly as it informs or should/could inform writing studies and pedagogy. These theorists, excluding Vitanza, have sought ways to bracket the complete deconstruction of the subject in order to posit a rhetorical and political agency without reaffirming the modernist subject, reestablishing individualism, or making essentialist claims. (76-7) Baillif has set the terms of the debate that followed the problem of the subject: critical theory must resist any turn back to the “modernist subject” defined consistently in terms of individualism and essentialism. And yet these terms consistently return as Bailiff points out at the time of her writing, 1997, in calls for the personal “as a locus of subjectivity while simultaneously focusing on the discursive formations and performance of that subjectivity, thereby avoiding the criticisms leveled at the self-expressivists of an earlier time” (77). This is the position I referred to in Chapter Two as the Spellmeyer-effect. To reiterate, here is Kurt Spellmeyer from his article “A Common Ground: The Essay in the Academy”: teachers should recognize that English 101, with its tolerance for essayistic introspection and digression, is probably the last opportunity most students will ever have to discover the relationship of mutual implication, a relationship fundamental to all writing, between the self and the cultural heritage within which selfhood has meaning. To put it in the simplest terms, we do not deny the socially-constituted nature of either learning or identity when we ask our students to write from their own situations, but I believe it is both disabling and dishonest to pretend that writing, no matter how formal or how abstract, is not created by persons, from within the contexts--historical, social, intellectual, institutional--of their lived experience. (269)
53 Spellmeyer’s endeavor here is to use “the essay,” as developed and practiced by Michel de Montaigne, as a tool to create commonality between, say expressivist pedagogies and constructivist pedagogies. The Montaignean essay is valued by postmodernists like Jean- Francois Lyotard, which Vitanza points out in his “Three Countertheses.” It is important to recognize that this return to the subject is not merely an isolated phenomenon; it is ubiquitous in composition studies. While Baillif is concerned with theorists and practitioners of the time, we can see this movement toward the personal constructed in the recent edition of College English which focused entirely on the concept of “creative non-fiction” as well as the inordinate increase in undergraduate and graduate programs in creative writing.14 It seems that the force of the value of the personal has swallowed up the postmodern deconstruction of the subject. Baillif, borrowing a taxonomy from Vitanza which defines contemporary approaches to the historiography of composition as “traditional, revisionary, and sub/versive,”15 labels these kinds of pedagogies as “revisionary expressivism.” Bailiff, however, is not interested in lining up the usual suspects that favor expressivist approaches, or even approaches that reclaim the individual as the locus of rhetorical power. She casts a wide net that includes thinkers we would normally not associate with expressivist pedagogies, for example, Susan Jarratt and Nedra Reynolds. As she puts it, Baillif selected this term because it underscores an emphasis on personal positionality—on embodied speakers, on lived experiences—and on the disclosure of that personal positionality—hence expressive. But the modified revisionary emphasizes Jarratt’s concern that an exclusively expressivist pedagogy fails to help students make ‘the turn from the personal back out to the public’ (‘Feminism’ 121). Therefore, although there are striking differences among these theorists, they appear to converge in notable ways regarding the goal of constructing personal and/as without reaffirming the ideology that sustains subject formation. (77) While Baillif lauds their attempts to “produce subjectivities that are multiple, material, and socially constructed” she finds, much like Worsham in “Emotion and Pedagogic Violence,” “they cannot deliver on the liberatory promises made” (77). The reasons why such pedagogical practices are not liberating are because they rely on a model of production for their success. Baillif turns to the postmodern French philosopher Jean Baudrillard to clarify her position: The project of production is founded in the modernist’s belief that at bedrock there is some referent, some principle of truth, and that one’s purpose is to reflect it accurately, and to find one’s self in that reflection—one’s truth, one’s cure, one’s liberation. This belief, called the ‘reality principle’ by Baudrillard, is the process of representation, naming, of constituting identity, of positing Truth, a process grounded in the dichotomy of presence/absence and its corollaries of active/passive and truth/deception, wherein one term is valued and the other is subjected—through a dialectical process—to a negation in order to establish an identity, to sustain the hierarchy. This, then, is the insidious violence of the subject’s will to representation: To create identity, either of self or truth, requires the negation and appropriation of the Other. (86) Baillif’s endeavor, much like Johnson’s and Vitanza’s, is to create a sub/version of composition
14 I am not arguing that all creative writing programs take this kind of “common ground” approach but that many of them do, and that one of the reasons for this increase in interest in creative writing is that it grants back to subjects some of the individuality and agency taken away form them by postmodern theory. The same goes for creative non- fiction. 15 See Vitanza, “Some Rudiments of Histories of Rhetoric and Rhetorics of History.” 54 studies, one that is a total critique that creates new possibilities for the field. Surely, then, Johnson must see Vitanza and Baillif as allies of a type. They all find themselves, as opposed to either traditional or revisionary critics, as “sub/versive” critics. Vitanza describes ‘sub/version’ as: [t]he effort, in part, to deconstruct the concept of the grand narrative for a supplementary (sub/valued) one. But this is no mere negative deconstruction, for in ‘version’ is also implied the favoring of verse, poetry, literary discourse, letteraturizzaziones, as a sub/versive, third force in language, a force that can be called upon as a means of reaching for an affirmative deconstruction of any dominant, hegemonic discourse. (“Rudiments” 238) For Vitanza such sub/versive forces of language are found in his “rhizomatic-‘polylectics.’” Baillif locates this sub/versive force in Baudrillard’s notion of seduction, and Johnson finds it in the notion of pleasure—all of which are of a species with Foucault’s affirmation of transgression in his “A Preface to Transgression.” Such “sub/versive” accounts, then, are to be taken as “wild” accounts, accounts which endeavor to transform, challenge the (real or perceived) dominant conceptions of a field, including basic things like argumentative practice. Through her critique of a politics of identity and reliance on personal location, Baillif suggests a model of argumentation that Johnson uses in practice: Speaking true to the place wherein you have already been spoken is not a point of departure, and, thus, I would argue, is not revolutionary, is not liberating, is not ethical. Perhaps, on the contrary, it would be ethical to exploit the little infidelities. If the reader gasped, ever so slightly at that suggestion, it would indicate how situated we are in a certain discourse. Until the parameters and boundaries of that discourse are displaced, any talk of liberation and emancipation is a farce at best and an insidious act of violence at worst. For fidelity in no way escapes the master/slave dialectical economy of mind. (88, emphasis in original) With Johnson, Vitanza, and Baillif, we can start to identify a tradition that mobilizes a number of concepts to affirm the differences that are summarily put aside by the dominant traditions of composition studies, including radical leftist positions like those of James Berlin, Susan Jarratt and others. The core concepts the counter-traditionalists have difficulty with, which they see as driving contemporary composition, are concepts like the personal, identity politics and positioning, resistance, and dialectics; against the personal they suggest the multiple; against identity politics they set up a micropolitics of bodies; against resistance they set up models of experimentation; and against dialectics they set up a model of critical affirmation. All of this is still in the service of a kind of liberation; however, for Vitanza, Johnson, and Baillif, liberation doesn’t occur at the altar of demystification and deconstruction empowered against dominant and hegemonic discourse. Liberation occurs as an act of liberating ourselves from ourselves. Now Johnson is not as clear about his project of affirmation as are Baillif and Vitanza, because he, as Worsham rightly points out in her discussion of exemplarity, seems unaware of micropolitical concerns. As a result she does gasp, textually, at the little infidelities in Johnson’s exposition of her work. As she puts it, Perhaps you can also imagine my confusion when, in closely following Johnson’s chain of reasoning, I find my discussion of the crucial role of emotion in pedagogy diverted to suit the direction of his argument—that is, first, it is represented as a condemnation of any pedagogy rooted in emotion; and, second, it is represented as an appeal for a ‘more
55 nuanced understanding of pleasure and empowerment.’ Certainly, alarm and confusion may be the signs, the feel, of thought really happening, of thought moving to a perilous edge, as Foucault would have it. But, in this case, my confusion and alarm are signs that thought has stalled, that exemplification has utterly failed, and that what has happened is a loss of contact between text and (this) reader and thus perhaps even a loss of the kind of intersubjective relation between text and reader that Johnson argues is the condition of possibility for taking pleasure in a text. (“Perilous” 717) For Worsham, micropolitics should be aware of all the possible relations a claim proffers, and she returns to her Foucault epigraph to highlight how Johnson has broken any possible relation, or form of contact, with Worsham. Now Worsham’s epigraph, as indicated above, has the power of being later in time and prior in space to the quotation in the epigraph used by Johnson; as such, it implies a kind of precedence over Johnson’s epigraph. This is only strengthened by Worsham’s critique of Johnson’s reliance on earlier examples of critics’ work in order to refute them. But there is more at stake in Worsham’s decision to counter Johnson’s epigraph with her own—it goes to the heart of the matter for her—a recognition of responsibility to and for the claims you make, and the examples you want to use. Although I have been unable to track down the original use of the epigraph Worsham chooses, other than as an epigraph to Language, Counter-Memory, Practice, the ideas produced there are very similar to ideas Foucault elaborates in his preface to the French edition of the History of Sexuality, Volume 2. In that preface, Foucault details the process of his work as it has moved from Madness and Civilization to the present. In terms of the History of Sexuality, he writes that he was interested in the idea of sexuality as a “historically singular act of experience” (Ethics 199). Such a viewpoint requires an analytical program that tries: to decipher how, in western societies, a complex experience is constituted from and around certain forms of behavior: an experience that conjoins a field of knowledge (with its own concepts, theories, diverse disciplines), a collection of rules (which differentiate the permissible from the forbidden, natural from monstrous, normal from pathological, what is decent from what is not, and so on), and a mode of relation between the individual and himself (which enables him to recognize himself as a sexual subject amid others). (Ethics 200) I imagine it is the complexity of the experience of pleasure that Worsham feels Johnson most elides. As such, one should not pursue a concept of pleasure without detailing instances of the multiple forms that pleasure takes, or the conditions of possibility for the pleasure to not exist. Hence in her fourth criticism of Johnson’s article she focuses on his lack of awareness of those for whom the “lived experience of social change is not orgasmic.” More importantly, though, Johnson’s response to Worsham’s response goes to the heart of the matter. After explaining that the length of a journal article doesn’t provide him with the space to provide the contextualization that Worsham calls for, he continues: Worsham’s will-to-misread rises to a kind of fever pitch when she takes up the issue of social change. First, some context: following Kristeva I link social change and jouissance, that experience of intense pleasure that temporarily overwhelms the structures that contain and individuate the subject, supplanting them with a trans-individual sense of ‘connection.’ I see in Kristeva’s theory a kind of intuitive common sense: social change, whether positive or negative, brings people closer together. In the worst of times, these bonds are sources of solace; in the best, they are rapt experiences of love. (“Misreading” 724)
56 But this has yet to attend to the issues Worsham claims are important: where is the support for such a claim about a relation between social change and jouissance. Johnson tips his hand by relying on what he calls an “intuitive common sense”; in short, the relationship exists because he feels it to be so, he experiences it bodily as his own felt sense. Thus, he is unable to understand the connection Worsham is trying to make between those who may be left out of experiencing social change as orgasmic. Johnson continues: But Worsham, flabbergasted that anyone could link the experience of jouissance to processes of social change, mysteriously offers, by way of counter-argument, this wild generalization: the vast majority of people live their lives as a prolonged experience of ‘quiet tedium, daily anger, seething silence, self-destructive rage, stunned fear, visible humiliation, crushing shame, burning hatred,’ and so on, and so on. How Worsham’s point relates to mine is rather unclear, but she seems to suggest that most people are incapable of experiencing any such happy sense of connection (jouissance), and that, even if they could these experiences would be irrelevant to the arduous process of altering the material conditions of their lives. (“Misreading” 724) Of course, Worsham makes no such claims. In addition, she does not set up her response as a counterargument. She establishes it as a concern, a concern over who is left out by such a call for pleasure, a concern that not every body experiences social change the same way. But it is his contention of an intuitive common sense about social change “bringing people together” that is at most, as Worsham puts it, “dangerous nonsense.” A case in point: Stonewall created a social change in the visibility of homosexuals in America. Many gays came out of the closet and over time many more continue to do so. This social change has had many effects: it has created increased acceptance for some gays, and has created a stauncher lack of acceptance for many others. In addition, it has created bifurcations among the differences within the gay community itself, creating many boundaries and limits. But in the worst of times it has created death, and unless one is interested in pursuing the orgasmic as “a little death” much like a sneeze, this example is a sign that social change is not always beneficial to all as Johnson would have it. Worsham’s concern is for the people who may be left behind by such broad and sweeping claims; it is a concern for an understanding of the total experience of pleasure. Again, we only need recall Richard E. Miller’s point that violent “unsolicited oppositional discourse,” like a gay bashing paper, can afford pleasure to some. To show his complete lack of awareness of Worsham’s point, Johnson accuses her of being “patronizing” and “alienating.” Johnson continues: Beyond its sheer ugliness (as ethics), this approach trips up badly as logic: if the stricken, staggering hordes of Worsham’s imagining were actually to experience social change, instead of the sorrowful paralysis she patronizingly attributers to them, wouldn’t they also feel a corresponding sense of surging release and an elevated experience of enjoyment? And vice versa: if they were to experience a keen sense of release, enjoyment, and connection, wouldn’t this constitute a social change, a reversal of the ‘burning hatred,’ etcetera that colors and consumes the blighted world? For example, might this be a viable way to think of a great many of the ten-zillion quirky little communities—all a-buss with a sense of mutual opportunity and intersubjectivity and pleasure—that spring up every year via the computer? (“Misreading” 725) Now this is so far from the tenor of Worsham’s response that it hardly makes sense at all. A critic influenced in any way by feminist thought should be wary to construct the orgasmic in terms of surging release, which implies the dominant masculine and phallic viewpoint. One
57 might be served better by understanding pleasure more in terms of multiple points of intensification. Johnson’s turn to the structure of the enthymeme once more in his “if…then” phrasing sets up again that he is not going to provide the missing links he needs to make the argument more logical. But moreover, his invocation of the computer and the number ten-zillion are little infidelities that show a total lack of awareness of others not within Johnson’s community. The number of computers in the world is finite; his invocation of ten-zillion communities indicates a movement towards the infinite. But worse, and regrettably, as Worsham indicates, Johnson seems to not have knowledge that there is a technology gap between the haves’ and have nots’ in the world right now. Such remonstrances by Johnson do not refute, nor do they even challenge, Worsham’s point. Instead they support the point that Worsham is too polite to make: his highly abstract construction of pleasure, a construction that resists explanation of the concrete experiences of pleasure, is relatable, because it fails to make contact with others, to a kind of self-pleasuring and exists as a kind of masturbatory fantasy. This is the ultimate point of the research methodology set out by Foucault that resonates with the epigraph chosen by Worsham: Thought…is not to be sought only in theoretical formations such as those of philosophy or science; it can and must be analyzed in every manner of speaking, doing, or behaving in which the individual appears and acts as knowing subject, as ethical or juridical subject, as subject conscious of himself and others. In this sense, thought is understood as the very form of action—an action insofar as it implies the play of the true and false, the acceptance or refusal of rules, the relation to oneself and others. The study of forms of experience can thus proceed from an analysis of ‘practices’—discursive or not—as long as one qualifies that word to mean the different systems of action as they are inhabited by thought…(Ethics 200-1) For Worsham, Johnson fails to recognize the reality that supports his theorizing—a reality built on the backs of others that provide him with the privilege to theorize. It operates for Worsham as a refusal of the past, and thus she understands Johnson’s endeavor of affirmation as always linked to the affirmation of the status quo. At the risk of absurdity, and in order to keep a sense of continuity, Worsham instead privileges a model of tantric resistance in the process of critique. Against Johnson’s “uncritical [read affirmative] relation between pleasure and politics,” Worsham writes in “On the Rhetoric of Theory” that we must always see theory as “a form of advocacy; more importantly, it must actively resist the reading it advocates” (392). Against affirming alternative pedagogies built on the back of theories, as Johnson proposes, Worsham contends that “theory is a kind of anti- pedagogy, a discourse of resistance and self-resistance; its overarching obligation, to keep the critical process open and moving” (“On” 392). Where Johnson is hopeful for the immediacy of the surging release of revolution, Worsham pushes for the consistent resistance involved in the long revolution. What we see here, in the unfolding of this argument, then are two clearly delineated positions within radical poststructural models of theorizing and critique: affirmation and resistance. One way to respond to this impasse would be to see it as a dialectical process and find the way towards a synthesis, or in the newer parlance of dialectics to see them as held in a never-ending tension.16 The immediate question is which is the positive or active term and which is the negative or passive term. I would argue that the terms cannot be reduced in such a way, and that to do so is to severely foreshorten the critical potential of either term. In short,
16 See Judith Goleman, “Reading, Writing and the Dialectic Since Marx,” and James Berlin “Revisionary History: the Dialectical Method.” 58 there is a difference in kind between the two models of critique and not a difference in degree. At the end of the day, affirmation as modeled by Johnson needs to be more aware of the micropolitical relations it implicitly advocates, and resistance as advocated by Worsham needs to be more aware of strategies of delay because it constructs itself in terms of an opposition or as the negation of affirmation. After Johnson’s response, Worsham—through the privilege of editorship which allows her to respond to the response—makes the following plea: Careful reading and thoughtful writing ought to be the preeminent standards for scholarship, especially in a discipline such as composition studies which has devoted itself to understanding and teaching the power of language to shape a habitable, just world. My essay…meant to turn attention to what ‘careful’ and ‘thoughtful’ should mean for those of us in positions to train future scholars and teachers of writing. For more than thirty years, composition studies has been engaged in the arduous struggle to establish itself as a discipline and to gain recognition of its work as a legitimate intellectual and scholarly enterprise. In the midst of this struggle, and with so much attention focused on delineating the subject (the Fach) that arguably constitutes the discipline as a discipline-- namely, first-year writing--there understandably has been little time for sustained and rigorous reflection on scholarly writing qua writing. My essay sought to provoke this reflection. Invited to engage the substantive issues raised in my essay, T. R. Johnson chose instead to summarily dismiss the substance of my thought by saying that ultimately it was motivated, that I am motivated, ultimately only by selfish need. The pleasure that he takes in the execution of this choice, and in a further misrepresentation of my thought and motives, is evident in his reply. (“Toward” 726, emphasis in original) And yet, it strikes me, that Worsham must know at some level that Johnson, because of the tradition he identifies with in his article, cannot simply turn to a discussion of the rules of engagement in academic discourse. His whole theoretical endeavor is to challenge that understanding of how it is that we do the kind of work we do in composition studies; to challenge the control of discipline on us as thinkers, scholars and teachers. And yet again, it strikes me, Johnson moves too quickly from his proposed model of affirmation towards a model of resistance to Worsham’s claims about his text. Thus his response, instead of what one would expect given the prevalence of the model of transgression outlined by Foucault is itself motivated by the desire to retain his ego intact. It is because of conflicts like this that Worsham has instituted her call for a rhetoric of theory. Situating Affect The frustration created between Worsham and Johnson can be linked to their differing understandings of what it is composition studies should do. In her conclusion to “Going Postal,” Worsham writes of the possibility of a way to deal with the impasse of pedagogies of violence in critical and postmodern pedagogies: The intersubjective model gives recent pedagogical discourse a way to begin to rethink its goals of returning agency to the subject and of recognizing the other as subject and agent—that is an alternative to the pedagogy of the reconquest of the external world, or what is radically other. Without a fundamental revision in our conception of subjectivity and our affective relationship to the world, the radical potential of recent pedagogy to reconstitute our emotional lives may be recontained, in spite of its best intentions and the euphoria of its claims, as a strategy of condescension. Bourdieu points out that condescension occurs in situations in which agents occupying a higher symbolic position
59 (by virtue of race, class, gender, or education, for example) deny the social (and, I would say, the emotional) distance between them and those to whom and for whom they speak (In Other 127-8). This distance does not cease to exist because it is symbolically denied through claims of identification and recognition. Rather the purely symbolic negation of distance ensures that the profits of recognition and distinction will confer the status of somebodiness on self-styled radical agents but without necessarily producing significant structural change in the social conditions of those who are subordinated. (241) This is a clear blow to the thinkers of composition’s countertradition like Vitanza, Baillif, and Johnson even though these thinkers are not the primary objects of her critique. However, she is clearly interested in a version of the reclamation of the subject, and hence might be read as one of those “revisionary expressivists” that Baillif describes. However it may be, it is clear that Worsham feels Johnson is operating under a “strategy of condescension.” For example, Johnson concludes “Discipline and Pleasure” with a fast set of linkages between theorists as diverse as Jean Baudrillard, Mary Douglas, Donald Murray and Sondra Perl, Gerald Graff, Peter Elbow, Andrea Lunsford and Lisa Ede. Altogether these thinkers create a zone of comprehension around the idea of the “double body”: “the body of social convention which mediates all knowledge of and experience of the human body; and the human body which provides a model or frame upon which the social body is identified, organized, and understood” (“Discipline” 448). These two bodies undergo a constant exchange of meaning and “[w]hen one is deliberately engaged with the continuous exchange of meanings between the two bodies, one speaks to one’s double (the felt sense, the other self), and this dynamic interanimating process, this quasi-erotic mixture of self and other, is the experience of pleasure” (“Discipline” 448). For Johnson the ultimate endeavor is to establish a pedagogy out of such doubling of pleasure: How do we create what Baudrillard would call a “primitive” classroom in which convention appears flexible, negotiable and open to address? I think that by foregrounding precisely the sort of conflicts and questions about disciplinary identity that I discussed at the outset we can create an environment rich in opportunities for pleasure: Gerald Graff calls this approach ‘teaching the conflicts.’ In addition to Graff’s strategy, we might trouble the binary of writing and speech, emphasizing the way stylistic principles and poetic devices can enable us to play with the sound of texts, immersing ourselves in a dialogic experience of the material substance of discourse in ways that render it more flexible and ourselves more prone to pleasure (see Elbow 1985). We can also precipitate such experience by emphasizing the distinction Lisa Ede and Andrea Lunsford adopt from Ong between the ‘audience addressed and the audience invoked.’ This latter is an internalized other, perhaps akin to the double or the felt sense, that reads and monitors our activity from a position ‘outside’ it…. In such a model, pleasure is not flatly dead-locked in a binary opposition with discipline. On the contrary, both bodies move in an interanimating spiral in which each continuously opens the other to new territories, to transgression or becoming as ‘the solar inversion of satanic denial.’ (“Discipline” 449) For Worsham, such claims about “applied theory” are a species of condescension because they apply a theoretical principle (in this case about pleasure) as if it were a brand of universal common sense without regard to how it might apply to actually existing others in the world. This is to say, that clouded in the discourse of theory, Johnson is arguing for pleasure from his own particular position and location, informed by his own particular experiences and desires, without owning up to where these ideas come from. Thus he closes the distance between himself
60 and others specifically through the use of theory. Hence, she argues in “On the Rhetoric of Theory,” that the “most important intervention,” a rhetoric of inquiry can make as a rhetoric of theory “is its effort to locate and situate a discourse in the place and time from which it emerges as function of that place and time, as a response to it and as an expression of the constraints of that circumstance” (393). This project begins to take on the character of the analytical project Foucault described above—the recognition of the perilous action of all thought, and in particular, theoretical discourse. To a certain extent, then, the rhetoric of inquiry overlaps considerably with a genealogical project. Worsham, herself, is well aware of this aspect of the project when she takes up the notion of disciplinarity itself. As mentioned earlier, disciplinarity is one of the chief objects of critique for the counter-tradition in composition studies. For Worsham discipline is a fact of life that “differentiates, measures, and hierarchizes; it creates docile and useful subjects who understand themselves as individuals equipped with free choice but who, by virtue of the position given to them by myriad disciplinary technologies (including gender, race and class), are always subject to surveillance and control” ("Rhetoric of Theory” 397). However, Worsham is very clear that Foucault does not adequately analyze the role of the “affective organization of space” constructed by disciplinary practices. Worsham continues: With its focus on the individual, disciplinary society achieves its goals of obedience, docility, and utility through the shame-effects resulting from the application of disciplinary procedures, but it also organizes what philosophers used to call moral emotions, such as pride and guilt (or, in the popular idiom, self-esteem and responsibility), to locate every individual in social space and control his or her conduct. Thus, what we take to be the most private and personal of phenomena—emotion and the body—are effects of social organization and made available for public administration through the effects of discipline. (“Rhetoric of Theory” 397) In a way, then, when someone like Baillif critiques “revisionary expressivism” for requiring “faith” in the position one occupies through the disclosure of that position, she is suggesting that such a pedagogy brings disciplinary procedures into play under the guise of individual belonging. Thus writing, in itself, is always caught up in a kind of matrix of disciplining that operates, as Worsham says, on both the “semantic and affective” levels. As a result, Worsham continues, “to understand the discipline that has evolved to study and teach writing, we must understand the way it works at both the semantic and affective levels to produce and organize knowledge and experience” (“Rhetoric of Theory” 397). However, as Worsham develops it, the rhetoric of inquiry, the first stage in a rhetoric of theory, has its own problems; it is “gender blind.” This adds to the project of rhetoric of inquiry the resistance Worsham suggests is necessary in the form of feminist critique: “At the level of explicit argument, what is needed is a feminist critique of the disciplinary discourse of composition studies, one that challenges the claim that through the appropriation of various theories and approaches the field escapes the disciplinary apparatus of modern patriarchal society into a nondisciplinary or postdisciplinary and postmodern (read egalitarian) place” (“Rhetoric of Theory” 398). Worsham, I think rightly, sees the development of the discipline of writing as a conflict between postmodernity and modernity, a conflict which often elides the contradictions in composition studies: contradictions within the field itself, between composition and the human sciences, and between composition and the world outside of academia. This is particularly what she sees happening in claims about affirmation as a critical process as exemplified by Johnson. It is important to note that Worsham, while being heavily influenced by feminist critique,
61 recognizes (as her model of resistance must) that there are other domains of critique organized around issues of race, class, and so on that should be inaugurated in relationship to a rhetoric of theory. At the end of the day, and after many suggestions for the kinds of work a rhetoric of theory might accomplish, Worsham settles in on her ultimate proposal: I propose that we seek to recover the rhetorics that possess composition studies, its past and future, and to highlight their contradictions through the critical leverage of a perspective that is not easily assimilated to either modernist or post modernist rhetoric. These rhetorics might be figured otherwise, in other terms….If it were possible to determine in advance how a line of inquiry were to proceed, I would hope that this one would be read as a question, or a constellation of questions, rather than as an answer in the form of fully developed argument….What remains important, however, are the questions that set the writing in motion. Intellectual work should be propelled by a rhetoric of discovery more often than a rhetoric of demonstration, even though the pressure in this postmodern is to offer answers that are more or less consumable. (“Rhetoric of Theory” 406) This then is the question: how can we, as composition scholars, discover a set of questions that motivates a line of thought in composition studies that explores how theory has constrained and enabled the contradictions within composition studies, that explores affective as well as semantic problems, that resists its discovery through feminist, class, and race critiques, and in search of future possibilities for rhetorics that can not be assimilated easily into either modern (disciplinary) or postmodern (feigned egalitarian) positions? In addition, based on Worsham’s criticism of Johnson, we need questions that are “careful” and “thoughtful” and engage with ideas, texts, concepts, and theories in responsible ways, in ways, Worsham implies, the counter- tradition in composition does not. What is needed is a multi-dimensional rhetoric of inquiry, one that constitutes its questions in the process of its examination, and that is both at once a process of critique and a process of creation—most importantly, a process that can be used by students and teachers alike. Such a multi-dimensional model of critique, however, would have to look past Worsham’s aversion to affirmation as a critical process. However, it would not be affirmation as described by Johnson in his article, an affirmation that implies the use of concepts, thoughts, and ideas without critique. Critical Affirmation and the Point of Critique Such a use of affirmation can be found in the work of Gilles Deleuze, and it is a necessary component of his larger critical project. Worsham herself highlights this critical project when she cites (as an epigraph to both “Emotion and Pedagogic Violence” and “Going Postal” as well as in a footnote to her article “Writing Against Writing: the Predicament of Ecriture Feminine in Composition Studies”) the Deleuzian epigraph to this chapter: “The point of critique is not justification but another way of feeling: another sensibility.” As we have seen, from the citation from “Emotion and Pedagogic Violence” above, Worsham folds this idea of critique into her discussion of how we should attend to issues of emotion if we hope to affect social change. We can see it, also, in her call for figuring rhetorics differently, although it is more subdued. At her most positive, Worsham has used this Deleuzian notion of critique to guide a kind of pedagogy that has some affinity with the counter-tradition described above. Here is Worsham from her article on ecriture feminine: The purpose of refashioning composition as cultural criticism, however, is not to stay within an epistemological justification but to liberate a different way of feeling, another
62 sensibility. Our emphasis should shift from the notion of writing as a mode of learning to that of writing as a strategy, without tactics or techniques, whose progress yields ‘unlearning.’ This result does not mean that writing produces ignorance; rather, it produces a sense of defamiliarization vis-à-vis unquestioned forms of knowledge. Writing would no longer function primarily as an agency in the articulation of knowledge and the redistribution of power; instead, it would become an indispensable agency for making the world strange and infinitely various…. Students may discover ways to make something of what has been made of them; they may begin to discover and to invent the ‘flavor’ of life in a society whose general tendency is toward conformity. Scholarship in composition, in the meantime, should examine ways in which culture is reproduced in its theory and in its practice-with a view toward becoming a site for the production of difference. (“Writing” 101-2) But here is Worsham’s more pessimistic version in her revision of “Emotion and Pedagogic Violence”: This project cannot succeed by mapping a new regime of meaning onto an old way of feeling, one that has only intensified with the so-called ‘waning of affect’ in the era of the postmodern (see Jameson). Face to face with the indomitable and archaic spirit of sex- hatred and race-hatred, for example, critical social theories have helped to shape an intellectual understanding of the practices and costs of othering. Yet a tear is not simply an intellectual thing, and a change of heart does not follow, naturally or simply, from a change of mind (see Neu). Grief, hatred, bitterness, anger, rage, terror, and apathy as well as emotions of self-assessment such as pride, guilt, and shame—these form the core of the hidden curriculum for the vast majority of people living and learning in a highly stratified capitalist society. This curriculum holds most of us so deeply and intimately and yet differently within its logic that our affective lives are largely immune to the legislative efforts of social critique and the legislative gains of progressive social movements. (“Going Postal” 216) There are three changes, and the most significant is probably the least obvious. Worsham writes, “critical theories help” to show the problems of othering in the first version; in this version she says “have helped,” which implies that they are no longer helping. In addition, she adds the reference to Jerome Neu’s book A Tear is an Intellectual Thing refuting the observation that change is simply a matter of changing one’s mind, because of the list of emotions that she describes as “form[ing] the core of the hidden curriculum” that influences people in contemporary society. Worsham uses an interesting metaphor here, one that implies the emotions she lists are kind of like viruses that have become immune to our antibiotics, in this case, social critique and social movements. What is interesting about the metaphor is how it returns us to a concern about bodies and their relations to the world. This is to say that our society, or culture, and the pedagogies in which they are built, has created a resistance to the power of affect in our lives. The question is how do we break down this resistance? What can we use to inoculate ourselves against such hidden curricula? The answer lies in model of affirmative critique, unlike Johnson’s double body model, and one which takes critique seriously. This is the Deleuzian model of critique as affirmation culled from the philosophy of Freidrich Nietzsche, who saw philosophers as diagnosticians of culture. For Deleuze, affirmation, derived from his very particular reading of Nietzsche, is not the easy agreement with or use of ideas as they are or of life as it is: “Nietzsche is engaged in a critique of all conceptions of affirmation which see it as a simple function, a function of being or
63 of what is” (Nietzsche 183). Instead, for Deleuze, “to affirm is to create, not to bear, put up with or accept” (Nietzsche 185). What affirmation creates is the release of the powers of life from the negations, oppositions, and contraries that constrain them. Deleuze continues: To affirm is still to evaluate, but to evaluate from the perspective of a will which enjoys its own difference in life instead of suffering the pains of the opposition to this life which it has itself inspired. To affirm is not to take responsibility for, to take on the burden of what is, but to release, to set free what lives. To affirm is to unburden: not to load life with the weight of higher values, but to create new values which are those of life, which make life light and active. There is creation, properly speaking, only insofar as we make use of excess in order to invent new forms of life rather than separating life from what it can do. (Nietzsche 185) The notion of evaluation for Deleuze refers to his understanding of the will to power as a part of Nietzsche’s genealogical critique: the will to power is not only the one that interprets but the one that evaluates (VP II 29: ‘Every will implies an evaluation.’) To interpret is to determine the force which gives sense to a thing. To evaluate is to determine the will to power which gives value to a thing. We can no more abstract values from the standpoint from which they draw their value than we can abstract meaning from the standpoint from which it draws its significance. The will to power as genealogical element is that from which senses derive their significance and values their value. (Nietzsche 54) In a later text, the will to power becomes a variant of what Deleuze calls “the image of thought,” that which makes it possible to think in the first place. Deleuze diagnoses the “representative image of thought” as the reactive will to power of modern philosophy. His understanding of critique shifts accordingly, but it still resonates with its Nietzschean sense of affirmation. Deleuze writes: Do not count upon thought to ensure the relative necessity of what it thinks. Rather, count upon the contingency of an encounter with that which forces thought to raise up and educate the absolute necessity of an act of thought or a passion to think. The conditions of true critique and a true creation are the same: the destruction of an image of thought which presupposes itself and the genesis of the act of thinking in thought itself. (Difference 139) Critical affirmation then requires the complete destruction of an idea, concept, practice, before it moves on to creation, before it moves on to thinking as such. Critical affirmation is consequent with the first parts of Worsham’s call for a rhetoric of inquiry. What it changes is that it takes Worsham’s idea of “figuring rhetorics otherwise” to a radical conclusion: Instead of the recovery of these rhetorics, it advocates their destruction based on how they create reactive values and do not set free life. Such a model of critique, folded into the process of inquiry Worsham calls for, requires a procedure. With Worsham’s aim for the production of questions, and her development of a form of the long revolution, we cannot assume such a practice of critical inquiry will have the audacity or arrogance to claim revolutionary liberation. It will not. This means that we must read the work of Deleuze (and Guattari) differently than Vitanza and the counter-tradition. This is not that difficult; we can take a hint from Deleuze himself. Deleuze’s reading of Nietzsche is based on his idea that Kant was incapable of finishing his model of critical philosophy because he relied too much on judgment from a transcendent position. His book on Nietzsche claims that it was Nietzsche who was able to get past this transcendent sticking point in order to get on with
64 philosophical critique. If it is possible that Nietzsche points how to develop critique, then he points how to critique modernity. Deleuze’s job is to complete that task. To do that he creates a counter-tradition of philosophy informed by Lucretius, Duns Scotus, Baruch Spinoza, David Hume, Nietzsche, and Henri Bergson among others. This counter-tradition exists in parallel to the dominant traditions of philosophy, namely the continental tradition and the analytic tradition. Deleuze’s endeavor, then, can be read as an attempt to have all these lines cancel each other out, thus exhausting modernity of all its claims, and thus clearing the ground for creation. From this perspective, the work of Deleuze and Guattari can be seen as a model of resistance which Worsham seems to advocate. And as such, it can be read differently from the way the counter- tradition advocates, for it has a concern with modesty and not condescension. In terms of Worsham’s call for a rhetoric of theory, such a vision of philosophical thought will end up by asking the ultimate rhetorical question—What’s next? It is in the exhaustion of the modern, and the process of getting there that we can relinquish our frustration to the perils and pleasures of joy. Thus I see my work as involved in the process of this “creative resistance.” In the meantime, we do the work of pushing for the exhaustion of modernity. We do this work by exploring a rhetoric of theory, folded together as a genealogy and a model of critical affirmation, derived from Deleuze’s work on Spinoza, and developed through Moira Gatens and Genevieve Lloyd’s work on “collective imaginings,” which Deleuze calls ethology. This practice, engaged with the process of inquiring into a rhetoric of theory that asks the question of how and why Deleuze and Guattari have entered as exemplary figures of the counter-tradition movement in composition studies, is the subject of my next chapter.
65 Chapter Five: The Spinozist Assemblage: From Ethos to Ethology In the previous chapter, I suggested that there was a self-announced counter-tradition in composition studies revolving around the work of Victor Vitanza, Michelle Baillif, and T. R. Johnson among others. I suggested that this counter-tradition was taking aim at traditional practices within disciplinary frameworks, for example traditional modes of argumentation, in order to create dissensus and promote alternative models for composition studies. I also pointed out how this counter-tradition was influenced greatly by the work of Deleuze and Guattari, and how this influence took the guise of an affirmative model of critique over a model that aimed for resistance. I ended by suggesting that for Deleuze, the point of an affirmative model of critique could not be mistaken in any way for the affirmation of the status quo, but required an absolute negation of negative and reactive principles. I pointed out how T. R. Johnson’s use of the affirmative model neglected this principle, because of his understanding of pleasure as immediately disruptive of identity configurations. In addition, I recognized Lynn Worsham’s call for a rhetoric of theory as an important step in the process of beginning an affirmative critique of the discipline of composition studies and its particular relationship to pedagogy. I maintained that Deleuze’s position on critique opted, much like Worsham’s position, for a sustained resistance view which requires a consistent engagement with dominant conceptualizations of structures like identity through counter-analyses which would work to exhaust the reliance on and validity of such configurations. The difference between the two is the difference of what occurs along with the critique. For Deleuze, critique must always lead to creation, while for Worsham such creation is always already grounded in a subject of some kind. The question at this point is what kind of counter-analyses can push along modernity to its point of exhaustion? The aim of this chapter is to suggest analytical practices, genealogy and ethology respectively, combined under the heading of a rhetoric of theory, that may perform such a task. And because, as Worsham indicates, a rhetorical reading of theoretical discourse “must acknowledge [theoretical discourse] is a form of advocacy…it must actively resist the reading it advocates” (“Rhetoric of Theory” 392), I choose to provide a rhetorical reading of the use the work of Deleuze and Guattari have been put to create this counter-tradition. The work of Deleuze and Guattari emerges into composition studies precisely because of the conditions of the field that Worsham lays out in “On the Rhetoric of Theory” which I outlined in Chapter 2. To remind you, Worsham argues that there are two “pedagogical imperatives” in contestation with one another, both of which argue from the position of postmodernity, but which, in the end, are really in the service of modernity. The first version of the pedagogical imperative, Worsham explains, “yokes the insights of postmodernism to a traditional modernist agenda—if not an epistemological level, then at an affective level” (“Rhetoric of Theory” 404). Worsham does not take the time to specify particular examples of which particular pedagogues might be involved in making a “modernist end run against postmodernism” (“Rhetoric of Theory” 404), which is a weakness, I think, of her position. But her point that these theorists can use “postmodern epistemologies” to recreate “modernist affects” is most interesting. This returns us to Worsham’s concern, based on her use of the Deleuze quotation as epigraph, that “the point of critique [rests ultimately in] a different way of feeling, another sensibility.” Any procedure that does not resist the modern affective economy is therefore suspect of reintroducing the same old modernist principles. For Worsham, the second pedagogical imperative, as I mentioned in Chapter 2, is more conservative and “claims to stand in opposition” to the first version. It does this by “express[ing]
66 itself as demand to abandon the role of education as an agency for social melioration and define the classroom exclusively as a place for individual learning” (“Rhetoric of Theory” 404). More importantly, this move “represents the legacy of bourgeois modernization as it refigures itself for a postmodern, late capitalist society which demands that workers continue to learn all their lives and that schools provide a kind of continuing education never seen before” (“Rhetoric of Theory” 404). Again, Worsham offers no examples of these kinds of pedagogues, preferring instead for the broad sweep of the provocative claim. However, based on her critique of Johnson, one can clearly see that she would include him as being guided by this second pedagogical imperative. It is also clear by her careful choice of the term “expresses” that Worsham considers those pedagogues that Baillif would call “revisionary expressivists” under this latter heading. The issue for Worsham, then, is not the critique of the existing species under each genus of pedagogical imperative; it is the pedagogical imperative itself. It is the pedagogical imperative itself which is trapped in modernizing discipline. Here Worsham is the most cynical about the prospect for the field under the guise of these two pedagogical imperatives: The pressure of these two conflicting imperatives may outline the future for composition studies which, at the present moment, seeks an affiliation with the oppositional stance formulated for intellectuals in literary and cultural studies while it will increasingly finds it necessary to respond the demands of the information society and a new definition of universal literacy that may make writing instruction, as we currently conceive it, obsolete…. Ultimately, however, the future of composition studies will be secured through structural changes in higher education that are already underway rather than through struggles internal to the field. This view does not discount our ability to respond to these changes, though our response is likely to reflect a deep and abiding ambivalence. (“Rhetoric of Theory” 405). In this account, composition studies appears to have no control over its own destiny. For someone like Johnson, such a rendering of the state of composition studies would be anathema; hence his foreshortened example of Worsham, and his push for an affirmative model of transgression—hence the move towards the work on the self. Johnson sees Worsham as doing violence to pedagogy. And she is, recognizably so. Her other epigraph to “Emotion and Pedagogic Violence” and its revision comes from Frantz Fanon and reads “decolonization is always a violent phenomenon.” Resisting the colonization of composition studies by modernity, disguised as postmodernity through the pedagogical imperative, requires a violent shock to thought, in order to enable thinking. Ethos and Haunting It is here that Worsham announces her final proposal to “to recover the rhetorics that possess composition studies, its past and future, and to highlight their contradictions through the critical leverage of a perspective that is not easily assimilated to either modernist or postmodernist rhetoric” (“Rhetoric of Theory” 405). It is interesting that she uses the word “possess.” It highlights the possibility of an approach to such a rhetoric of theory about the pedagogical imperative through the rhetorical concept of ethos, in the sense that Susan Jarratt and Nedra Reynolds define it through one of its key etonyms—ethea—which translates as “haunts.” Jarratt and Reynolds emphasize that by “haunts” they mean “hangouts” because they are interested in, as I noted earlier Baillif argues, reconstructing the social locations from which subjects, and in particular feminist subjects, may speak. For my purposes, I will read haunts less as geographical positioning, and more in terms of the idea of possession—ethos as the attitudes
67 and habits that possess us, that haunt our many relations to self and others. For what are the two versions of the pedagogical imperative if they are not different ways of claiming ethos for the discipline of composition studies, of pointing out that disciplinarity of modernity which haunts and possesses composition studies. Understanding modernity in terms of ethos is not a new way of understanding modernity. In one his last essays, “What is Enlightenment,” Foucault makes such a proposal. Caught up in the debate over “modernity” by Jurgen Habermas, Foucault re-describes modernity not as an epoch, but as an ethos: I wonder whether we may not envisage modernity as an attitude rather than as a period of history. And by ‘attitude,’ I mean a mode relating to contemporary reality; a voluntary choice made by certain people; in the end, a way of thinking and feeling; a way, too, of acting and behaving that at one and the same time marks a relation of belonging and presents itself as a task. No doubt, a bit like what the Greeks called an ethos. And consequently, rather than seeking to distinguish the ‘modern era’ from the ‘premodern’ or ‘postmodern,’ I think it would be more useful to try to find out how the attitude of modernity, ever since its formation, has found itself struggling with attitudes of ‘countermodernity.’ (Ethics 309-10). Modernity, for Foucault, is a consistent programmatic reflection on the present; what Foucault calls variously a “historical” and “critical ontology of ourselves,” which as part of the intellectual relationship to the Enlightenment “problematizes man’s [sic] relation to the present, man’s historical mode of being, and the constitution of the self as an autonomous subject” as well as “the permanent reactivation of an attitude—that is, of a philosophical ethos that could be described as a permanent critique of our historical era” (Ethics 313). Here we can clearly see Worsham’s project of a rhetoric of theory in operation, particularly as it relates to a “permanent critique.” However, a clear difference emerges in how Foucault would fashion such a model of critique, and Worsham’s overtly pessimistic view. Foucault points out the criticism “consists of analyzing and reflecting upon limits,” but in terms of the Enlightenment the question of limits was posed wrongly: If the Kantian question was that of knowing what limits knowledge must renounce exceeding, it seems to me that the critical question today must be turned back into a positive one: In what is given to us as universal, necessary, obligatory, what place is occupied by whatever is singular, contingent, and the product of arbitrary constraints? The point, in brief, is to transform the critique conducted in the form of necessary limitation into a practical critique that takes the form of a possible crossing-over. (Ethics 315) For Foucault, here, the work to be done at the limits creates a clear possibility for transformation. Such critique takes the form of what Foucault calls an archeology and a genealogy. Criticism, Foucault argues, will no longer be about the “search for formal structures of universal value” [r]ather, as a historical investigation into the events that have led us to constitute ourselves and to recognize ourselves as subjects of what we are doing, thinking, saying. In that sense, this criticism is not transcendental, and its goal is not that of making a metaphysics possible: it is genealogical in its design and archeological in its method. Archeological—and not transcendental—in the sense that it will seek not to identify the universal structures of all knowledge or of all possible moral action, but will seek to treat the instances of discourse that articulate what we think, say, and do as so many historical events. And this critique will be genealogical in the sense that it will not deduce from the
68 form of what we are what it is impossible for us to do and to know; but it will separate out, from the contingency that has made us what we are, the possibility of no longer being, doing, or thinking what we are, do, or think…. it is seeking to give new impetus, as far and wide as possible, to the undefined work of freedom. (Ethics 315-6) Foucault’s archeology/genealogy, then, carries with it a moment of affirmation. This affirmation is modeled though, ultimately, as a kind of work of the self on the self: “I shall thus characterize the philosophical ethos appropriate to the critical ontology of ourselves as historico-practical test of the limits we may go beyond, and thus as work carried out by ourselves and upon ourselves as free beings” (Ethics 316). For Worsham, it should be recognized, there are two clear problems with Foucault’s propositions. Based on her description of the second model of the pedagogical imperative, we could imagine that Foucault fails here for precisely the reasons that Johnson fails: the emphasis on selves subject to either pleasure or critical ontology makes no recognition of the clear differences (for example, gender, race, class, sexuality) in play. Foucault’s selves are too general. As such, one can run the risk of eliding such differences and, to re-quote Worsham, “mystify the structural injustices” prevalent in our new century by advocating the transformation of a self that has yet to be socially accepted as a self. There is no awareness of the dangers and violence such a practice might create. In addition, as Worsham points out about Foucault’s notion of discipline, “Foucault might have made more of his observation that discipline not only provides for the semantic organization of space, and individuals within social space; it also provides for their affective organization” (“Rhetoric of Theory” 397). While Foucault moves in the direction of recognizing affective concerns through his use of ethos (“a way of thinking and feeling”), he certainly does not give affect a major role in his analytics. That role is still reserved for power relations: “What is at stake, then, is this: how can the growth of capabilities be disconnected from the intensification of power relations” (Ethics 317). This is an important claim because it becomes the key fixture, for Foucault, of the operations of counter-modernity. On the one hand, it establishes a critical movement towards micropolitical or microphysical analyses, the kind of analysis Worsham herself does in relation to exemplarity. On the other hand, it carves out a position for transformation of the existing ways people relate to themselves on a bodily level. Counter-modernity, then, for Foucault works from the inside of modernity plotting and critiquing with an eye towards the transformation of the dominant relations that organize how people speak, think, and do the things they speak, think, and do. For Worsham, in addition to the failure to recognize the work of affect and an overly generalized self, this process would sound suspiciously like a combination of the two pedagogical imperatives: a political work on the self that reinstitutes individual freedom based on a conception of continuous work on the self. If it were possible to locate Worsham’s overall concerns for composition studies, it would be in her constant call for history and context. Worsham is concerned that Foucault’s ethos of counter-modernity cannot just undo the ethos of lived history; of the affective construction of a history which, as Frederic Jameson describes it in his preface to The Political Unconscious, “is what hurts.” If the point of theoretical practice is to raise questions, or in Foucauldian terms “problematize” the historical present, then what the two pedagogical imperatives problematize is the affective relation between composition studies, its students (in all their varieties), its teachers (tenured, tracked, part-time, and adjunct), other disciplines (humanities and sciences), and the outside world (social, political, and economic). The frustration and danger--that which haunts teachers and students--of contemporary pedagogy is precisely in how it makes us feel singularly
69 and collectively. So, then, the primary question is how does one offer a pedagogy, or teaching, that while it cannot get outside of its own modern conditions, offers counter-modern possibilities for learning, that by neither re-affirming the modern or postmodern, pushes toward the exhaustion of modernity both in affective and collective ways. It is in response to this question that compositionists have taken up the work of Deleuze and Guattari, and in order to examine this uptake, we need a critical practice that goes beyond genealogy to the heart of the affective matter itself. Spinozist Interventions: From Counter-Modern to Anti-Modern In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari, while recognizing the similarities between themselves and Foucault, find fault with Foucault’s reliance on power relations. As Aurelia Armstrong explains It is certainly true that Deleuze and Guattari share Foucault’s starting point on the issue of subjectification. They endorse Foucault’s analysis of productive power and with it his claim that ‘it is one of the prime effects of power that certain bodies, certain gestures, certain discourses, certain desires come to be identified and constituted as individuals.’ But although Deleuze and Guattari understand subjectification as subjection, they claim in A Thousand Plateaus that they do not follow Foucault in privileging mainly phenomena of counterattack and resistance in their analysis of the social. Instead, they posit phenomena of creation and deterritorialization as primary in any body or assemblage. (Armstrong “Agency” 49) The issue is which is primary, power-relations or desire, in organizing assemblages or bodies? For Deleuze and Guattari power-relations are secondary to desire in the organization of assemblages or bodies. In a series of notes addressed to Foucault, Deleuze clarifies these differences in terms of Foucault’s references to pleasure and Deleuze’s understanding of desire: The last time we saw each other, Michel says to me, with much kindness and affection, something like: I cannot bear the word desire; even if you use it in another way, I cannot stop thinking or living that desire=lack, or that desire is the repressed. Michel adds: As for me, what I call ‘pleasure’ is perhaps what you call ‘desire’; but in any case I need another word other than desire. Evidently it is again something other than a question of words. Since as for myself I can hardly bear the word ‘pleasure’. But why? For me, desire does not comprise any lack; neither is it a natural given; it is but one with an assemblage of heterogeneous elements which function; it is process, in contrast with structure or genesis; it is affect, as opposed to feeling; it is ‘haecciety’ (individuality of a day, a season, a life), as opposed to subjectivity; it is event, as opposed to thing or person. And above all it implies the constitution of a plane of immanence or a ‘body without organs’, which is only defined by zones of intensity, thresholds, gradients, flux. This body is as biological as it is collective; it is on this body that assemblages make and unmake themselves, it is this body which bears the points of deterritorialization of assemblages and lines of flight. It varies (the body without organs of feudalism is not the same as that of capitalism). If I call it a body without organs, it is because it is opposed to all strata of organization, that of the organism, but just as much the organization of power. It is precisely the set of organizations of bodies which will break the plane or the field of immanence, and will impose on desire another type of ‘plan’, each time stratifying the body without organs. (Deleuze “Desire”) What Deleuze is describing here is desire as a material process which doesn’t so much precede
70 the elements in any heterogeneous assemblage, but rather a material process that emerges with the various relations of elements in any heterogeneous assemblage. Deleuze then understands that the overall assemblage of all assemblages has a tendency not for organization, but for fleeing from their condensed points of organization. By beginning with desire as a productive process of variation, Deleuze posits the social field as an open field, that is to say, a process of consistent exchange and interaction among varying assemblages. This has several consequences, one of the most important of which is that relations precede that which is related. In addition, it challenges any basic notions of modernist agency—resistance is always already an aspect of desire on a level prior to that of power relations. This is the immanent level of affect. With his focus on power relations, Foucault is unable to constitute such a field. His field is marked by explicit limits where the work of critique is to be done. In relationship to the idea of pleasure, Deleuze is explicit: I cannot give any positive value to pleasure because pleasure seems to me to interrupt the immanent process of desire; pleasure seems to me to be on the side of strata and organization…. Pleasure seems to me to be the only means for a person or a subject ‘to find themselves’ again in a process which overwhelms them. It is a reterritorilization. And from my point of view, it is the same way that desire is related to the law of lack and the norm of pleasure. (“Desire”) Power-relations, then, don’t operate as forms of resistance as Foucault would have it; they are what close down the openings on the field of immanence. They are then to be understood as a condition of transcendence, and not immanence. As a result, for Deleuze, micropolitical analyses cannot start from the position of power: I am not sure that micro-systems can be described in terms of power….the desiring assemblage marks the fact that desire is never a ‘natural’ nor a spontaneous determination. Feudalism for example is an assemblage that puts into play new relations with animals (the horse), with the earth, with deterritorialization (the battle of knights, the Crusade), with women (knightly love), etc….desire circulates in this assemblage of heterogeneities, in this sort of ‘symbiosis’: desire is but one with a given assemblage, it is a co-functioning. Of course a desiring-assemblage will include power systems (feudal powers for example), but they would have to be situated in relation to different components of the assemblage. Following one axis, one can distinguish in the desiring- assemblage states of things and enunciations….Following another axis, one can distinguish the territories, or reterritorializations, and the movements of deterritorialization which carry away an assemblage (for example all the movements which carry away the Church, Knighthood, peasants). Systems of power would emerge everywhere that re-territorializations are operating, even abstract ones. But assemblages would also comprise points of deterritorialization. In short, systems of power would neither motivate, nor constitute, but rather desiring-assemblages would swarm among the formations of power according to their dimensions. (Deleuze “Desire”) Power, then, for Deleuze forms as the affection of desire, making power derivative of desire itself. As such, power relations are only one part of the interaction of desire within a social field; the other part are the lines of flight, or “points of deterritorialization,” which push the assemblage to consistently make and remake itself. In this understanding of the social field, then, power relations as organized around models of resistance, both resist the power relation itself, but they also resist the total exhaustion of the field. This sustains the field by creating stratified organizations of resistance where the resistance becomes parasitic upon itself, an
71 infinite regress of resistance, or “perpetual critique.” It is no wonder, then, that Worsham does not find much solace in the possibility of the end of disciplinarity modernity. Adopting a Deleuzian frame, then, micropolitical analysis must be done on the order of desire and not on the order of power relations. Deleuze sets up the sites of analysis: processes and not structures or beginnings; affects and not feelings; individuation and not subjectivity; events and not objects or persons; instead of an ethos as Foucault describes it, an ethology that analyzes the social field before assemblages are captured in power relations. But what would such a practice look like, and how would it intervene into the frustrations and dangers of a rhetoric of theory? Deleuze devises his understanding of ethology in relationship to the 17th century Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza. The relationship between Deleuze and Spinoza is complicated (and here you can take complicated literally, as being folded with). Alain Badiou has gone so far as to say that Deleuze’s Spinoza is unrecognizable (8). Pierre Macherey is a bit more kind in suggesting that Deleuze works on the notion of “expression” in Spinoza’s work “because it actually stands between Deleuze and Spinoza as a constructive device or heuristic scheme, as the mark of an encounter, which is the best way to characterize a philosophical experiment that has definitively broken with the traditional methods of philosophy” (“Encounter” 157). Deleuze, then, does not try to place Spinoza within a traditional history of thought, nor does he try to provide a definitive reading of Spinoza’s thought; rather he experiments with Spinoza. For example, here is Deleuze in a lecture on Spinoza from 1980, saying that “affectus in Spinoza is variation (he is speaking through my mouth; he didn't say it this way because he died too young...)” ("Lecture"). Some, perhaps Worsham, may argue that this kind of reading may be inherently problematic in that it mis-represents the writer, but Deleuze, unlike Johnson, is interested in creating an assemblage of intensities and concepts that can set free what is alive in the text. He is not merely interested in playing with the text; he is seeking its lines of flight, “asking what it functions with, in connection with what other things it does or does not transmit intensities, in which other multiplicities its own are inserted and metamorphosed” (Deleuze and Guattari Thousand 4). The question we should ask about Deleuze’s Spinoza is not if it is right, or correct, or true, but how can we use it to reduce the frustrations and dangers of composition in order to create moments of joy. In recent years, Spinoza has come under considerable interest by philosophers, theorists, and critics wishing to engage materialism anew and those who also want to escape Cartesian dualism. As such, Spinoza has become the philosopher of counter-modernity, and a figure of the radical enlightenment. As Antonio Negri describes, Spinozism provides the ethos for anti- modernity: Spinozism has always represented a reference point in the critique of modernity, for it opposes to the conception of the subject-individual, of mediation and the transcendental, which inform the concept of modernity from Descartes to Hegel and Heidegger, a conception of the collective subject, of love and the body as powers of presence. Spinoza constitutes a theory of time torn from purposiveness or finality, which grounds an ontology conceived as a process of constitution. It is on this basis that Spinozism acts as the catalyst of an alternative in the definition of modernity….[Spinoza] is where the break at the origin of modernity is taken up again, the break between productive force and relations of production, between power and mediation, between singularity and the Absolute. Not an alternative to modernity, then, but anti-modernity, powerful and progressive. (“Spinoza’s Anti-Modernity”)
72 Spinoza, then, according to Negri, inaugurates a powerful counter-tradition to the idea of modernity, one that as an anti-modernity seeks to exhaust it at the point of its original construction. This, in short, is not your grandfather’s Spinoza. Spinoza is released from his original categorizations: He is not a mere rationalist, he is not just a figure of pantheistic thought, and he is not the originator of a totalizing system. Who then is this new Spinoza for Deleuze? “No philosopher was ever more worthy, but neither was any philosopher more maligned and hated,” Deleuze writes of Spinoza in his book Spinoza: Practical Philosophy (17). Deleuze explains that this negative attachment to Spinoza is not the cause of “the great theoretical thesis of Spinozism: a single substance having an infinity of attributes, Deus sive Natura, all ‘creatures’ being only modes of these attributes or modifications of this substance” (Spinoza 17). Instead, Deleuze claims the reason for the maligning of Spinoza could be understood if one were to begin by exploring Spinoza’s “practical theses,” which “imply a triple denunciation: of ‘consciousness,’ of ‘values,’ and of ‘sad passions’ (Spinoza 17). Deleuze’s approach here is interesting; he is beginning with the affects that Spinoza’s work makes possible. In this case, Spinoza’s philosophy made possible an intense hatred by many philosophers. By locating this affect as the result of Spinoza’s practical theses and not his overall theoretical presentation, Deleuze is able to reconstruct Spinoza’s philosophy against the grain, not as an elaboration on theoretical principles, but theory as subtending from practical positions. Thus Deleuze is explaining that the value of Spinoza lies not in his theoretical maneuvers, but in the way Spinoza practices philosophy. The three practical theses Deleuze finds in Spinoza, and their corresponding accusations by maligners and haters are listed as: “A devaluation of consciousness (in favor of thought): Spinoza the materialist” (Spinoza 17); “A devaluation of all values, and of good and evil in particular (in favor of ‘good’ and ‘bad’): Spinoza the immoralist” (Spinoza 22); “A devaluation of all the ‘sad passions’ (in favor of joy): Spinoza the atheist” (Spinoza 25). Under the first practical thesis, Deleuze distinguishes Spinoza’s concern for the body. Deleuze is often fond of citing Spinoza’s idea that “we still do not know what a body can do,” and many commentators on Deleuze mark this as what captures Deleuze’s imagination about Spinoza. Here is the citation from Spinoza: For indeed, no one has yet determined what the Body can do, i.e., experience has not yet taught anyone what the body can do from the laws of nature alone, insofar as nature is only considered to be corporeal, and what the body can do only if it is determined by the Mind. For no one has yet to come to know the structure of the body so accurately that he could explain all its functions--not to mention that many things are observed in the lower animals that far surpass human ingenuity, and that sleepwalkers do a great many things in their sleep that they would not dare to awake. This shows well enough that the body itself, simply from the laws of its own nature can do many things which its mind wonders at. (Ethics, Book 3, Proposition 2, Scholium) Certainly, today, we can suggest that we know much more about what a body can do than did Spinoza, but we still can not determine what a body can do in all cases, at all times. In any case, the point for Deleuze is that this unknown about the body “is a matter of showing that the body surpasses the knowledge we have of it, and that thought likewise surpasses the consciousness we have of it” (Spinoza 18). This is because of Spinoza’s theory of mind/body parallelism: The mind and body are one and the same thing, which is conceived now under the attribute of thought, now under the attribute of extension. Whence it comes about that the
73 order of the concatenation of things is one, or, nature is conceived now under this, now under that attribute, and consequently that the order of actions and passions of our body is simultaneous in nature with the order of actions and passions of our mind. (Ethics Book III Proposition 2, Note) In the dualism inaugurated by Descartes there are two substances: thought and matter. For Spinoza there is only one substance, but this substance expresses itself in innumerable attributes. Human beings, however, are only aware of two of these attributes: thought and extension. The mind operates on the level of thought, the body on the level of extension. Because of this difference, mind and body are unaware of another: “The human mind has no knowledge of the human body, nor does it know it to exist, save through ideas of modifications by which the body is affected” (Ethics Book II. Proposition 19). The point of such a description of the relations between mind and body for Deleuze has nothing to do with working out the problem of how the mind can know the body at all; it points to an entirely different direction. Deleuze writes: The practical significance of parallelism is manifested in the reversal of the traditional principle on which Morality was founded as an enterprise of domination of the passions by consciousness. It was said that when the body acted, the mind was acted upon, and the mind did not act without the body being acted upon in turn (the rule of the inverse relation, cf. Descartes, the Passions of the soul, articles 1 and 2). According to the Ethics, on the contrary, what is an action in the mind is necessarily an action in the body as well, and what is a passion in the body is necessarily a passion in the mind. There is no primacy of one series over another. (Spinoza 18). Altogether this project of attending to the concerns of the body philosophically creates an awareness of an implicit excess: “What does Spinoza mean when he invites us to take the body as a model? It is a matter of showing that the body surpasses the knowledge we have of it, and thought likewise surpasses the consciousness we have of it” (Spinoza 18, emphasis Deleuze’s). For Deleuze, attending to the body and how little we know of how it does what it does reveals both the unknown of the body and the unconscious of thought. The distinction here is between topographical models of the unconscious, for example what many have taken to be the Freudian unconscious, which find the unconscious delimited by the structures of the brain and/or the body. Deleuze’s Spinozist unconscious exceeds the brain and the body, and thus, the individual person as well. What such an understanding, according to Deleuze, entails is the recognition that “consciousness is by nature the locus of an illusion”: [the nature of consciousness] is such that it registers effects, but it knows nothing of causes. The order of causes is defined by this: each body in extension, each idea or mind in thought are constituted by the characteristic relations that subsume the parts of that body, the parts of that idea. When a body ‘encounters’ another body, or an idea another idea, it happens that the two relations sometimes combine to form a more powerful whole, and sometimes one decomposes the other, destroying the cohesion of its parts. And this is what is prodigious in the body and the mind alike, these sets of living parts that enter into composition with and decompose one another according to complex laws. The order of causes is therefore an order of composition and decomposition of relations, which infinitely affects all of nature. But as conscious beings, we never apprehend anything but the effects of these compositions and decompositions: we experience joy when a body encounters ours and enters into composition with it, and sadness, when, on the contrary, a body or an idea threatens our own coherence” (Spinoza 19).
74 This is the very definition of what Toulmin referred to as the ontological illusion. For Spinoza and Deleuze, being “conscious beings,” that is beings who allow ourselves to be determined by our conscious thought without awareness of relations of composition and decomposition, “condemns us to have only inadequate ideas, ideas that are confused and mutilated, effects separated form their real causes” (Spinoza 19). Deleuze presents these inadequate ideas as a result of three illusions of consciousness: Since it only takes in effects, consciousness will satisfy its ignorance by reversing the order of things, by taking effects for causes (the illusion of final causes): it will construe the effect of a body on our body as the final cause of its [our body’s] own actions. In this way it will take itself for the first cause, and will invoke its power over the body (the illusion of free decrees). And where consciousness can no longer imagine itself to be the first cause, nor the organizer of ends, it invokes a God with understanding and volition operating by means of final causes or free decrees, in order to prepare for man [sic] a world commensurate with His glory and His punishment (the theological illusion). (S: PP 20) Deleuze is quick to point out that these “illusions of consciousness” are not a false consciousness, as in early Marxist understandings of ideology. Consciousness is itself constituted by these illusions. One cannot have consciousness separate from these three illusions. In a contemporary secular society, which everywhere seem to be in retreat, the theological illusion will be created by the “rule of law” and the whole juridical-political apparatus that stands in for theology. In fact, it is arguable that one of the reasons that secular societies seem to be in retreat is precisely because people are finding the rule of law to be illusionary. This turns us to Deleuze’s final point about consciousness: what is the cause of consciousness and its three constitutive illusions? For Deleuze the answer is to be found in a definition of desire (Spinoza’s term is conatus) that can show the cause “by which consciousness is hollowed out, as it were, in the appetitive process” (Spinoza 21). Deleuze quotes Spinoza on how people judge things to be good: “we neither strive for, nor will, neither want, nor desire anything because we judge it to be good; on the contrary, we judge something to be good because we strive for it, will it, want it, and desire it” (Ethics Book III, Proposition 9, Scholia). Deleuze uses this quote to show that, for Spinoza, “consciousness adds nothing to appetite [conatus]” (Spinoza 20). Because of this, Deleuze develops the idea of conatus in particular relation to the causal series of the composition and decomposition of relations: Now, the appetite is nothing else but the effort by which each thing strives to persevere in its being, each body in extension, each mind or idea in thought (conatus). But because this effort prompts us to act differently according to the objects encountered, we should say that it is, at every moment, determined by the affections that come from the objects. These determinative affections are necessarily the cause of the consciousness of the conatus. And since the affections are not separable from a movement by which they cause us to go to a greater or lesser perfection (joy and sadness), depending on whether the thing encountered enters into composition with us, or on the contrary tends to decompose us, consciousness appears as the continual awareness of this passage from greater to lesser, or from lesser to greater, as a witness of the variations and determinations of the conatus functioning in relation to other bodies and other ideas. (Spinoza 21) At this point, we can begin to see how Deleuze’s objections to Foucault’s power-relations
75 develop from his ideas about Spinoza. Power-relations, defined as both the determination of bodies and the resistance of bodies, function as one kind of determinative affection, one that works on the decomposition of bodies, or perhaps, that keeps bodies in a perpetual state of non- composition with other bodies. This is why Deleuze claims that power is only an affection of desire. Consciousness is one way that power reterritorializes lines of flight, or in Deleuze’s Spinozist terminology, the composition or relations with bodies that increase our power of action, that create joy. Under the second practical thesis—“a devaluation of all values, and good and evil in particular,”—Deleuze develops the insights about bodies and their relations of composition and decomposition as they bear on issues of value. If, as Deleuze claims, the ignorance of these relations is what causes the illusions of consciousness, then we should recognize that any morality founded upon such illusions would seriously be called into question. Accordingly, then, for Deleuze’s Spinoza good “is when a body directly compounds its relations with ours, and with all, or part, of its power increases ours [power]” (Spinoza 22). The bad, by correlation, “is when a body decomposes our body’s relation, although it still combines with our body’s parts, but in ways that do not correspond to our essence [the conatus], as when a poison breaks down the blood” (Spinoza 22). There are thus, for Deleuze and Spinoza, two kinds of meaning: an “objective meaning” which is “relative and partial” and has to with those other bodies that either agree with or do not agree without nature; and a “subjective and modal” meaning which “qualif[ies] two types, two modes of man’s existence” (Spinoza 22). Deleuze delineates these dynamic modes by reference to good and bad individuals: That individual will be called good (or free, or rational, or strong) who strives, insofar as he is capable, to organize his encounters, to join with whatever agrees with his nature, to combine his relation with relations that are compatible with his, and thereby to increase his power. For goodness is a matter of dynamism, power, and the composition of powers. That individual will be called bad, or servile, weak, or foolish, who lives haphazardly, who is content to undergo the effects of his [sic] encounters, but wails and accuses every time the effect undergone does not agree with him and reveals his own impotence. For by lending oneself in this way to whatever encounter in whatever circumstance, believing that with a lot of violence or a little guile, one will always extricate oneself, how can one fail to have more bad encounters than good? (Spinoza 22- 3) Such a version of interactions between people, Deleuze says, turns us away from morality as a model towards ethics as a practice. Deleuze explains: In this way, Ethics, which is to say, a typology of immanent modes of existence, replaces Morality, which always refers existence to transcendent values. Morality is the judgment of God, the system of Judgment. The opposition of values (Good-Evil) is supplanted by the qualitative difference of modes of existence (good-bad). The illusion of values is indistinguishable from the illusion of consciousness. Because it is content to wait for and take in effects, consciousness misapprehends all of nature. Now, all that one needs in order to moralize is to fail to understand. It is clear that we only have to misunderstand a law for it to appear to us in the form of moral “You must.” (Spinoza 23) The shift from morality to ethics is constructed by creating a “typology of immanent modes of existence” that is diagnostic at the same time as it offers a mode of action. Encounters between bodies, then, are to be understood as modes of experimentation, and in that sense, encounters are purely practical. The modes of existence are immanent because they do not rely on any
76 transcendent form of understanding (for example, consciousness, conscience, God, or law) for justification. These modes of existence are qualitatively different because one does not take the sum total of all of actions to decide what is good or bad; one explores the objective selection of relations and the subjective, modal increase or decrease of power based on those combinations. While this ethic is clearly instantiated on the body, the question that arises is how does this work under the attribute of thought? Deleuze argues, much in the same way that way consciousness does not add anything to appetite (conatus), morality, as transcendent law, adds nothing to knowledge. Because of this, a “difference of nature is constantly manifested between knowledge and morality, between the relation of command and obedience and the relation of the known and knowledge”: Moral law is an imperative; it has no other effect, no other finality than obedience. This obedience may be absolutely necessary, and the commands may be justified, but that is not the issue. Law, whether moral or social, does not provide us with any knowledge: it makes nothing known. At worst, it prevents the formation of knowledge (the law of the tyrant). At best, it prepares for knowledge and makes it possible (the law of Abraham or Christ). Between these two extremes, it takes the place of knowledge in those who, because of their mode of existence, are incapable of knowledge (the law of Moses). (Spinoza 24) Thus one of the claims for an ethic over a morality is to increase knowledge. This is the pedagogical imperative. But the pedagogical imperative here is cast in a new framework, Spinoza’s antimodernist framework. As Worsham describes it, the pedagogical imperatives that define disciplinary modernity are still too caught in the problems of law: whether of the establishment of the democratic citizen as law, or the creation of the autonomous individual as law. As Deleuze puts it, “Law is always the transcendent instance that determines the opposition of values (Good-Evil), but knowledge is always the immanent power that determines the qualitative difference of modes of existence (good-bad)” (Spinoza 24-25). It is the law of modernity that constructs the two versions of the pedagogical imperative, as Worsham describes them, as contradictory, as good and evil depending on which version you select to belong to. In either case, as Worsham points out, we will struck by ambivalence depending on which version we hold to, which version we choose to advocate. For Deleuze’s Spinoza, operating from either position as a kind of law, even if a small “l” law, separates us from what we can do. Instead, we need to re-think the imperative completely, not as obedience but as knowledge: “as the immanent power that determines the qualitative difference of modes of existence.” Without such a shift, we will be left at the level of the illusions of consciousness, that is suffering under determinative affections without understanding their causes. Pedagogy, therefore, needs to be rethought as an ethology. Under his explication of Spinoza’s third practical thesis—a devaluation of all the sad passions in favor of joy—Deleuze characterizes Spinoza as drawing “the portrait of the resentful man,” the person inundated with sad passions, the person who “exploits” those with sad passions, and the person “who is saddened by the human condition and by human passions in general” (Spinoza 25). For Deleuze, Spinoza offers a critique of sad passions: “first, sadness itself, then hatred, aversion, mockery, fear, despair, morsus conscientia, pity, indignation, envy, humility, repentance, self-abasement, shame, regret, anger, vengeance, cruelty” (Spinoza 26). Such a critique is in the service of a “philosophy of life” which “consists precisely in denouncing all that separates us from life, all these transcendent values that are turned against life, these values that are tied to the conditions and illusions of consciousness” (Spinoza 26). As with the
77 other practical theses, this last one works on the two levels of thought and extension, as in the critique of the sad passions, and on the level of bodily affections. This is the cornerstone of Spinoza’s theory of affections. But how are we to understand affection, surely a vexed term if ever there was one? Deleuze derives his understanding of affect from Spinoza’s use of two differing terms in his theory of affection. Deleuze clarifies this in one of his lectures on Spinoza: In Spinoza's principal book, which is called the Ethics and which is written in Latin, one finds two words: AFFECTIO and AFFECTUS. Some translators, quite strangely, translate both in the same way. This is a disaster. They translate both terms, affectio and affectus, by “affection.” I call this a disaster because when a philosopher employs two words, it’s because in principle he has reason to, especially when French easily gives us two words which correspond rigorously to affectio and affectus, that is “affection’ for affectio and “affect” for affectus. Some translators translate affectio as “affection” and affectus as “feeling” [sentiment], which is better than translating both by the same word, but I don't see the necessity of having recourse to the word “feeling” since French offers the word “affect.” (“Lecture”) “Thus,” Deleuze concludes, “when I use the word “affect” it refers to Spinoza’s affectus, and when I say the word “affection,” it refers to affectio” (“Lecture”). For Deleuze, then, there is a clear distinction between affect and affection. For Deleuze, the difference is stated this way: It has been remarked as a general rule the affection (affectio) is said directly of the body, while the affect (affectus) refers to the mind. But the real difference does not reside there. It is between the body's affection and idea, which involves the nature of [as the result of an encounter with some other body] the external body, and the affect, which involves an increase or decrease in the power of acting, for the body and the mind alike. The affectio refers to a state of the affecting body and implies the presence of the affecting body, whereas the affectus refers to the passage from one state to another, taking into account the correlative variation of the affecting bodies. (Spinoza 49) Affection (affectio) then would reference what we would call in everyday language “emotion” or “feeling”; while affect (affectus) refers to the actual passage from one state of affection to the next in terms of whether this passage increases or diminishes a body’s power to act. It is this theory of affect that, for Deleuze, turns ethics into an ethology. Deleuze explains: An individual is first of all a singular essence, which is to say, a degree of power. A characteristic relation corresponds to this essence, and a certain capacity for being affected corresponds to this degree of power. Furthermore, this relation subsumes parts; this capacity for being affected is necessarily filled by affections. Thus, animals are defined less by the abstract notions of genus and species than by a capacity for being affected, by the affections of which they are ‘capable,’ by the excitations to which they react within the limits of their capability. Consideration of genera and species still imply a ‘morality,’ the Ethics [of Spinoza] is an ethology which, with regard to men [sic] and animals, in each case only considers their capacity for being affected. (Spinoza 27) This becomes significant for considering ethology as an extension of genealogy when we recall that what was at stake for Foucault in his re-thinking of the Enlightenment was the relationship between capacities and power relations. For Deleuze, power relations were only an affection of desire. Thus there are many other affections that are not subsumed under the heading of power relations that are possible for us to analyze. Deleuze’s ethology tries to establish a micro-
78 analytics of bodies that that works more extensively than Foucault’s. This can be clearly seen in Deleuze’s exposition of ethology in relation to bodies. Deleuze writes that we need to “distinguish between two sorts of affections”: actions which are explained by the nature of the affected, and which spring from the individual’s essence; and passions, which are explained by something else, and originate outside the individual. Hence the capacity for being affected is manifested as a power of acting insofar as it is assumed to be filled by active affections, but as a power of being acted upon insofar as it is filled by passions. For a given individual, i. e., for a given degree of power assumed to be constant within certain limits, the capacity for being affected remains constant within those limits, but the power of acting and the power of being acted upon, in inverse relation to one another. (Spinoza 27, emphasis in original) With this exposition we can start to see the typology that Deleuze is developing: there are active affections, on the one hand, and passions, or passive affections, on the other hand. We can also posit, given the thesis of parallelism, that active affections will make possible active ideas, and passive affections, will make possible passive thoughts. What is to be sure is that individuals will always be affected, but what Deleuze refers to as the power of acting and the power of being acted upon will vary because it is the result of the types of affections that emerge from individual encounters. Deleuze continues the development of his typology of modes of existence by pointing out that there are also two types of passions that correspond to the dynamics of acting or being acted upon: sad passions and joy. This has to do with the increase and the decrease of our power of acting. For Deleuze, because of the power of the illusions of consciousness, it is passions that fill our capacity for being affected “separating us from our power of acting” (Spinoza 27). Deleuze explains this in terms of encounters with other bodies: When we encounter an external body that does not agree with our own (whose relation does not enter into composition with ours), it is as if the power of that body opposed ours, bringing about a subtraction or a fixation; when this occurs, it may be said that our power of acting is diminished or blocked, and the corresponding actions are those of sadness. In the contrary case, when we encounter a body that agrees with our nature, one whose relation compounds with ours, we may say that its power is added to ours; the passions that affect us are those of joy, and our power of acting is increased or enhanced. This joy is still a passion, since it has an external cause…. [but] this power of acting is nonetheless increased proportionally; we approach the point of conversion, the point of transmutation that will establish our dominion, that will make us worthy of action, of active [and not passive] joys. (Spinoza 28) It is this particular idea of becoming worthy of joy that marks Deleuze’s reading of Spinoza, and his understanding of ethology as an extension of genealogy. The “sad passions,” Deleuze claims, mark the “threefold practical problem of [Spinoza’s] Ethics” (Spinoza 28). Such a problem is to be addressed by three questions (as Worsham would wish, these are questions created by the theory): How does one arrive at a maximum of joyful passions?, proceeding from there to free and active feelings (although our place in Nature [or modernity] seems to condemn us to bad encounters and sadnesses). How does one manage to form adequate ideas?, which are precisely the source of active feelings (although our natural condition [or the two versions of the pedagogical imperative] seems to condemn us to bad encounters and sadnesses). How does one become conscious of oneself, God, and of things?…(although our consciousness [or subjectivity] seems inseparable from illusions). (Spinoza 28)
79 This is the problematic that ethology explores. Feminist Supplements: From Ethos to Ethology And yet, I worry that the problems of the actually existing others that Worsham highlights cannot be met by such an ethological practice. Can a Deleuze-Spinoza conjunction escape the pitfalls that capture Johnson and Foucault as outlined by Worsham? Deleuze’s consistent use of the term “man,” for example, certainly calls into question the applicability of his reading of Spinoza for women. The key distinction, I would argue, is Deleuze’s emphasis on bodies, relations, and affections. As Catherine Mary Dale puts it “[t]he practice of viewing a body by breaking it down or dissembling it in order to appraise its ability to act makes it impossible to maintain the domination and authority of single primary identities” (7). Such a view radically reconceives the idea of bodies. Deleuze writes that Spinoza defines a body in two ways at once: a body, however small it may be, is composed of an infinite number of particles; it is the relations of motion and rest, of speeds and slownesses between particles, that define a body, the individuality of a body. Secondly, a body affects other bodies, or is affected by other bodies; it is this capacity for affecting or being affected that also defines a body in its individuality. (Spinoza 123). This definition of bodies has two main consequences for Deleuze: because a body is, first, defined by its relations of speed and slowness it cannot “be defined by a form or a function” (Spinoza 123). In addition, a body cannot be defined as a subject, because a body is defined secondly by its capacity to affect or be affected, you can only define it “by the affects which it is capable of” (Spinoza 124). This deliberately disrupts our usual taxonomic model of organization into genus and species. Deleuze writes that “there are greater differences between a plow horse or race horse than between an ox and a plow horse...because the plow horse and the race horse do not have the same affects nor the same capacity for being affected; the plow horse has affects in common rather with the ox” (Spinoza 124). Such a break down in the normal modes of classification requires us to rethink considerably the structures we use to describe and define things, animals, and persons. For Deleuze, what he learns from Spinoza, is that a body can be anything: “it can be an animal, a body of sounds, a mind or an idea; it can be a linguistic corpus, a social body or a collectivity” (Spinoza 127). A body, then, is always more than the sum total of its parts. It is how bodies can be understood as modes of existence that is the primary concern of ethology, and indeed Deleuze describes ethology as a way to “construct the map of the body” (Spinoza 128). And for this reason, such descriptions of bodies are mapped in terms of having a longitude and a latitude: We call longitude of a body the set of relations of speed and slowness, of motion and rest, between the particles that compose it from this point of view, that is, between unformed elements. We call latitude the set of affects that occupy a body at each moment, that is, the intensive states of an anonymous force (force for existing, capacity for being affected). (Spinoza 127, emphasis in original). This rendering of the body breaks open the body so that it can never be seen as a particularly bounded entity with a particular purpose. So, at the affective level of microanalysis Deleuze delineates, the typical categories of woman, black, proletarian, and so forth are called into question in relationship to how such categories create a delimited function and purpose for such persons. It does not, however, deny the real differences that exist for such persons because their capacity for affecting and being affected will certainly be part of their particular bodily organization as it is determined by other bodies they encounter. It is important to recognize, as
80 Deleuze puts it, nothing “is ever separable from its relations with the world. The interior is only a selected exterior, and the exterior, a projected interior. The speed or slowness of metabolisms, perceptions, actions, and reactions link together to constitute a particular individual in the world” (Spinoza 125). Moira Gatens, a feminist philosopher who works through the work of Deleuze and Spinoza in order to try and imagine a feminist politics differently, explains this: from the standpoint of ethology, sex, gender, race and class distinctions appear as coagulations of molecular combinations, strata or more or less stable configurations that are held in place by a complex variety of practices that are at once discursive (for example, the human sciences), normative, (for example, medical and legal ‘codes’), and subjectifying (subjects designated as ‘woman,’ ‘native,’ ‘mentally ill’). A theory of power developed from this perspective will concern itself with relations between bodies, their habitual configurations within specific assemblages, and the dynamic of the interrelations between their typical affects. An immanent, ethological appraisal of the manner in which bodies are composed may reveal the fragility of molar forms. (“Feminism” 65) Molecular and molar are terms Gatens borrows from Deleuze and Guattari. Within the context of her passage here, molar refers to bodies that have been highly structured by discursive, normative, and subjectifying practices (which we could also think of as the three contemporary illusions of consciousness). A body that is supple and open, prior to being codified by these practices, is molecular. What we normally talk about as subjects are the molar configurations of molecular bodies. Like Foucault, Deleuze is interested in how it is that bodies come to take the form that they have in our culture. Like Foucault, Deleuze recognizes that bodies are formed through the intervention of material forces on particular parts of the body. Unlike Foucault, however, Deleuze recognizes that there are not only material power-relations of domination and resistance; there are also immaterial forces like affects which create lines of flight from molar configurations of bodies. This is why Deleuze claims that the question primary for him is different from Foucault’s question: How can power be desired? From the framework Deleuze develops, prompted by Spinoza’s Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, the questions read this way: Why are people so deeply irrational? Why are they proud of their own enslavement? Why do they fight for their bondage as if it were their freedom? Why is it so difficult not only to win but to bear freedom? Why does a religion that invokes love and joy inspire war, intolerance, hatred, malevolence, and remorse? (Spinoza 10) But the point is that a particular bodily organization is never stable, because of the affections that necessarily combine with it; a body is always in process. To deny this is to suffer under the illusions of consciousness, for Deleuze and Spinoza, identity or subjectivity are precisely the result of these illusions, but also the place where every body starts. Gatens builds her understanding of ethological practice as what she calls part of an “anti- juridical tradition...[which thinks] against a fundamental proposition of humanist philosophy, namely, that viable sociability requires the organization of an individual’s natural affects and dispositions by a power that transcends the natural condition” (“Feminist” 60). The example Gatens gives is the Leviathan of Thomas Hobbes. Of course we can see it also in the many concepts proliferated by the ontological illusion: the transcendental ego, the universal subject, and so forth. The result of such a juridical tradition is to create out of nature two conflicting planes: “first, a plane of immanence (nature itself); second, a transcendent plane which functions to organize and socialize the first” (“Feminism” 60). The problem is that the plane of transcendence organizes bodies into what Deleuze and Guattari call “molar” forms which Gatens
81 identifies as defined by genus and species and “conceived in functional terms” (“Feminism” 61). On the plane of immanence, on the other hand, bodies are conceived as “molecular” assemblages, defined not by functional identities, but by a “ceaseless process of becoming something else” (“Feminism” 61). Gatens argues that Deleuze finds Spinoza useful because his monistic philosophy constructs only a plane of immanence, without recourse to a plane of transcendence. From this perspective, “nature is conceived as immanently self-organizing” (“Feminism” 60) Such a viewpoint leads to the description of bodies given above. As Gatens explains it, there are a number of changes to our usual descriptions of bodies: a body can only considered as “a part of dynamic and interconnected whole,” it is differentiated only by its relations “of speed and slowness, motion and rest, of the parts which compose it,” and “its identity can never be viewed as a final or finished entity” (“Feminism” 61). Because of this we can conceive of the human body as “permanently open to its surroundings” and as such “can be composed, recomposed, and decomposed by other bodies” (“Feminism” 61). So a body goes through a series of encounters with other bodies, every day of its life, constantly being formed, reformed and deformed. The point to remember is that these encounters do not get interiorized into a space of the body; rather they subsist in the relations of the parts of the body—they exists as folds of the inside and outside. For Spinoza, a mind is only as complex as the body it is connected with. So, for example, one’s knowledge, like one’s body, is entirely based on the kinds of encounters one has had, and on the kinds of affects these encounters produce. This clearly ties together the epistemological and the ontological. As Gatens puts it, “Reason, or the power of thought, thus cannot be seen as a transcendent or disembodied quality of the ‘soul,’ but rather, reason, desire, and knowledge are embodied and express, at least in the first instance, the quality and complexity of the corporeal affects” (“Feminism” 60). A body then is capable of freedom only in the sense that it can “actively select [its] encounters rather than always being the plaything to chance encounters” (“Feminism” 61), or encounters prompted only by some external body, what is described as “passions” above. Gatens’ use of active here might be subject to a charge of a return to agency. This is not the case. As was pointed out above, activity refers specifically to combining relations that increase ones power to act, and these are productive only of sociability, and not individual agency. The question of ethology is, then, to map our encounters in terms of relations and capacities to affect, and then experiment with these relations and capacities in an endeavor to think them differently-- to experiment with our habitual modes of encounters. And because the ontological and the epistemological fold together “to think differently is...to exist differently: one’s power of thinking is inseparable from one’s power of being and vice versa” (Gatens “Feminism” 63). The objective, then, is to select out the ways in which our bodies’ relations and affects have been organized by the plane of transcendence (subjected to ontological illusions), and to experiment with them on the plane of immanence. But how does one go about doing that? I will argue, like Deleuze, that we take Spinoza very seriously when he construes everything as bodies and all bodies as assemblages of other bodies. This means that we take the long held tradition of calling the parts of a paper in between the introduction and the conclusion “the body” and stop considering this term metaphorically. This will shift, both, how we conceive of students’ texts from the position of assignments and evaluation. In terms of assignments, Gatens lists a number of questions that respond to the ethological perspective on selecting out similarities and differences of bodies in terms of a bodies’ powers of affecting and being affected: “What can this body do? What are its typical relations with other bodies and what are its typical powers?
82 What makes it weaker? What makes it stronger?” (“Feminism” 64). We can shift these questions to our understanding of our students’ writings as parallel constructions of our students’ bodies. This is important because it allows us as teachers to evade the issues that student texts are either the direct effect of a disembodied mind, or the same thing as the student’s interiorized understanding of their soul or self. As Gatens puts it, “there is no sense in the claim that a certain set of embodied relations is the cause of the powers possessed by those bodies” (“Feminism” 65). This means, in terms of the longitude and latitude of ethological description, that one does not just combine one’s descriptions of relations and affects to predict the outcome of some body. In short, as Spinoza writes, we still do not know what a body can do beforehand. According to Gatens, we can look at the differing kinds of encounters bodies have with one another as three kinds of “relations of composability: compatible, which give rise to joyful affects that may in turn increase the intensive capacity of a body”; “incompatible relations that give rise to sad or debilitating affects, which at their worst may absolutely destroy a body’s integrity”; and non-reciprocal wherein a “more powerful body captures the less powerful” (“Feminism” 64). Gatens gives the example of eating to describe incompatible relations, and the historical relation between men and women as an example of non-reciprocal relations of capture. As Gatens describes it, these relations are never fixed and constant; they can change. Gatens argues that it is a process of working backwards from the coagulated forms of identity that the plane of transcendence has passed on to us through discursive, normative, and subjectifying means. Experimentation, then, occurs as a process of unlearning I mentioned when discussing Worsham in Chapter 2. William Haver also draws out this concept of “unlearning”: The question of the pedagogical must undoubtedly be allowed to resonate in several registers simultaneously: in the formal and informal disciplinary structures of our learning, certainly; in institutional classrooms, of course, not excepting the university classroom and the seminar; but also, and perhaps most importantly, in our microscopic learnings, unlearnings, and relearnings, the infinitesimal negotiations by which we learn and unlearn the world. In no case, of course, are these registers mutually exclusive. (285) Unlearning is a process of negotiation between the molarized forms persons have been constituted by, and the experimental processes of their constituting themselves differently, in thought and being. Negotiation, of course, is a problematic term--it sounds too much like a business tactic. Deleuze, however, in the epigraph to a collection of interviews and articles, describes philosophy as being only capable of negotiation, because it is not a power like “religions, states, capitalism, science, the law, public opinion, and television” (Negotiations). Because philosophy is not a power, Deleuze writes: philosophy can’t battle with the powers that be, but it fights a war without battles, a guerilla campaign against them. And it can’t converse with them, it’s got nothing to tell them, nothing to communicate, and can only negotiate. Since the powers aren’t just external things, but permeate each of us, philosophy throws us all into constant negotiations with, and a guerilla campaign against, ourselves. (Negotiations, frontispiece) Unlearning, is such a guerilla campaign that we have to wage against ourselves, at the level of the powers that permeate our bodies, organize us into molar forms, inscribe habits of inattention, rhetoricize our bodies, and interiorize our psyches. The place to begin such negotiations of unlearning is, considering the general goals of composition, with language, examining the practices of language. As Gatens writes, an ethological approach to language will examine it from an immanent and political perspective,
83 which is to say “specific statements and specific utterances will be analyzed for the manner in which they capture, transmit, or engender affects” (“Feminism” 70). This implies that we understand such statements and utterances as bodies which encounter other bodies of all sorts. Language, then, becomes for Deleuze and Guattari entirely performative, and because of that, they recognize its primary function not as communication but as the transmission of what they call “order words.” Order words both order and organize the world. They are not imperatives in the traditional sense; they refer to “any statement insofar as it functions to order acts, affects, desires, states of affairs...statements [then] presuppose and engender the imposition of a framework of intelligibility, a narrative, upon affects and states of affairs” (“Feminism” 70). In addition to the order word, Deleuze and Guattari posit the pass-word “which transform the compositions of order into components of passage,” or transformations through experimentation with affective relations, what Deleuze calls deterritorialization above. Words, then, as Gatens describes them, express both the attempt to capture bodies in stable forms (the limitative dimension) and the possible, or virtual, becomings of bodies (the expansive dimension). By positing the merely possible as the real, order words aim to materialize bodies as organizations of affects and powers, and always with a prohibition on the transformation of that organization, a prohibition against decomposing these relations and composing other ones. (“Feminism” 71) In the end, ethological approaches to bodies, sociability, and language can transform the feeling of the rhetoric of theory. Theory can become a site for the examination of the modes of capture performed on the bodies of students as perceived through the examination of their own work, and also can become a laboratory for experimenting with different compositions of relations, different modes of knowing, and of course different modes of being. Affective labor, then, is this type of ethological experimentation that operates through locating and describing the affective organization of our bodies, and unlearning that organization through processes of experimentation with our relations and affects. Rethinking the writing we do through literalizing the metaphor of the text as body, while also not reducing bodies to texts, is the work of affective labor as the completion of an affirmative critical process. First a genealogy, and then an ethology. As Gatens puts it in collaboration with Genevieve Lloyd: “Spinoza’s ethical and political writings…may be seen to suggest both a method of understanding what one is on the basis of one’s past (genealogy) and knowledge of what one may become on a basis of an increase in the knowledge of one’s powers and capacities (ethology)” (107). Such an understanding will require new practices of unlearning. For example, how do we unlearn the writing process? How do we unlearn the forms of writing, so developed as molar containers of ideas as they are? How do we unlearn reading as the imposition of meaning on to a body? How do we unlearn the subject of composition, the student writer who by changing their language changes who they are? And, finally, how do we unlearn teaching, and stop molarizing our students into specific forms?
84
Section Three: Labor
85 Chapter Six: Affective Labor: Returning to the Subject of Composition Up to this point my aim has been to show how the double-bind of composition studies, as presented in Worsham’s version of the pedagogical imperative, has helped to constrain understandings of experience and affect in both critical and affirmative tendencies in composition studies. I have also tried to show that recuperating a Spinozist relational ontology could refocus our attention to affect and experience in a productive way. What has so far been only diagnostic will now turn prescriptive. In this section I will describe how the reconceptualizations of experience and affect, given this relational ontology, create not just a way of, but can also create a different way of interacting with the world. To do this, I turn to the issue of labor, and primarily the kind of labor it is we ask our students to do in our classes. Recently there have been several examinations of the role of labor as it relates to teachers laboring in the classroom. Given the conditions of composition studies with its extreme reliance on part-time adjunct labor, this is important and significant work. For my purposes here, however, I am much more interested in developing our understanding of the kind of work we ask our students to do as their labor is reconceptualized through a Spinozist intervention. While it may seem that the issues of ontology might be far from issues of labor, it is important to remember that the Spinozist assemblage inaugurated by Deleuze, and picked up by Gatens and others, proceeds from the very idea that such an ontology leads specifically to an ethics, which I have identified as an anti-modern ethos of affirmation. But before we get to a rethinking of student labor, it is necessary to survey the current understanding of student labor in our classrooms. The kind of double-bind I noted in other areas of composition can also be found in exploring issues of labor in composition studies. Examples of these differing positions can clearly be seen in the text of the proceedings from the 1993 “Composition in the Twenty-First Century: Crisis and Change” conference. At that conference, James A. Berlin and Shirley Brice Heath endeavor to answer the question “What Political and Social Issues will Shape Composition in the Future?” Their response is two-fold: the changing conditions of work have made the college degree less likely to land graduates good jobs, and the curriculum of composition needs to be restructured to deal with this problem. In his presentation, “English Studies, Work, and Politics in the New Economy,” James A. Berlin positions the changes in kinds of work in relationship to economic, political and cultural conditions in order to present a way English Studies can deal with those conditions. For Berlin, the key to understanding the new economic situation is best understood by recognizing the differences between Fordism, and, following David Harvey, what Berlin calls “the regime of flexible accumulation, or post- Fordism” (“English” 216). Fordism is best understood as those processes of production described as mass production. Mass production, under Fordism, takes place in a centralized location. The process was standardized, mechanized, and Taylorized (made more efficient by someone controlling the time and types of movements necessary for the completion of a job). For Berlin, Fordism required the mass consumption of standardized products, created a “rigid division between manual and mental labor,” and developed extensive bureaucratized hierarchies. On the positive side, Berlin says that one thing that Fordism made possible was “an accommodation...between management and labor in which higher wages were exchanged for managerial control of production” (“English” 216). Berlin continues by suggesting that although Fordist models of production still exist they are changing rapidly into post-Fordist models. Berlin describes post-Fordism well:
86 First, production becomes an international process made possible by the compression of space and time as a result of rapid travel and communication.... Second, there is a turn to small batch production of a variety of goods rather than the mass production of homogeneous projects.... productions operations are smaller and responsive to demand...Third, internationalizing corporations through decentering operations is in turn accompanied by the decentralizing of urban areas. (“English” 217) Berlin argues that the shift to the regime of post-Fordism brings with it a number of dramatic effects not just for the economic realm, but also in the social and cultural realm as well. Economically, it means more control by employers over employees, faster turnover in production, a smaller, more exclusive management, a different division of labor in the work force between a full time clerical class and part-time, temporary employees. In addition, Berlin points out that women in this new economy become more easily exploitable “because they are still the primary care givers for the home and family throughout the industrial world” and the jobs they take outside of the home are potentially limited to the part-time, temporary type (“English” 218-9). Berlin recognizes the necessity of teaching certain kinds of skills to this new projected work force. Berlin writes, “I don’t think that we in the academy can just ignore the advice of employers. We must, indeed, provide a college education that enables workers to be excellent communicators, quick and flexible learners, and cooperative collaborators” (“English” 222). But, he insists, students “must also be prepared to become active and critical agents in shaping the economic, social, political, and cultural conditions of their historical moment” (“English” 220) which requires a different kind of preparation “in dealing with the abstract and systemic thinking needed for the dispersed conditions of post-modern economic and cultural developments” and a commitment to a “comprehensive range of democratic educational concerns” (“English” 223). In his presentation, Berlin argues that within this democratic perspective “knowledge is regarded as a good that ought to serve the interests of the larger community as well as individuals” (“English” 223). Here, through his emphasis on knowledge as a “good,” he focuses on how this knowledge functions as a particular good. Berlin writes that “English studies has a special role in the democratic educational mission”: our students are more likely to acquire the abilities and dispositions that will enable them to become successful workers than they are to acquire the abilities and dispositions to make critical sense...of their daily experience in postmodern culture. When it comes to understanding the creation and fulfillment of desire through the media, for example, our students receive virtually no guidance from the schools. While there is no denying that many of our young people arrive at sophisticated strategies for negotiating the messages of the media on their own, this is too important a part of daily life to be left to chance. In the age of the spectacle, democracy will thrive or fall on our ability to offer a critical response to these daily experiences. (“English” 224-5) Berlin constitutes English studies as a necessary condition for the success of democratic action in this country. For Berlin, what English studies produces is a critical citizen capable of a specialized kind of knowledge--the critique of media images and texts. Although some may arrive at sophisticated strategies for dealing with media on their own, for Berlin it is best to build a sophisticated curriculum so that students can be “formally prepared to critique the images that today occupy the center of politics” (“English” 225). Here, the use value of knowledge as a good, or service, gets transformed into a specialized knowledge of the language of critique. This
87 is clearly the first angle of the pedagogical imperative as Worsham describes it. Now, I’m not arguing that composition shouldn’t do the kind of work that Berlin suggests, nor do I think it is necessarily unproductive. My point is only to show that Berlin’s commitment to his kind of work for English studies is caught up in what John Trimbur calls a “narrative of professionalization,” the moral of which is the need “to transform rhetoric and composition from a service function located at the periphery of academic life into a viable discipline” (“Writing” 134). Like Trimbur, and as we will soon see Bruce Horner, I feel this professionalization leads to an “unequal” distribution of power and resources within composition, an unequal distribution that takes place in the debates of the field: debates between teaching “skills” or teaching “art,” between empirical research and theory, between scholarship and teaching. But, more than just that, I worry that these incessant debates in composition miss the real problem: what is composition’s relation to what is outside the academy. At the same conference, and on the same panel as James Berlin, Shirley Brice Heath brings this question of the outside to the fore. However, instead of starting with English Studies and moving out, Heath starts with the outside and tries to bring it in. Heath writes: We are faced today with rival validities between what social science tells us and our preference for remaining comfortable within our current institutional frames and tasks. We prefer to ask ‘What are we doing?’ (And hence talk about pedagogical tactics) than ‘What is college composition doing here--in this place in this institution and in its role in the society?’ Current social science and organizational research along with economic projections force us to hear things which do not nurture complacency about this latter question. (“Work” 239). For Heath, the primary question composition should ask itself is: given the current social, economic, and cultural conditions, what could composition do other than building up its relationship to the world outside of the academy? For Heath this question is a necessity, because based on the organizational and economic projections she cites, which follow closely the principle of post-Fordism described by Berlin, the academic world is going to look very different in twenty years. Heath, following John Trimbur, argues that by “2015 or 2020...the autonomous, self- regulated, tenure giving, self-interested, over professionalized institution dealing in the currency of credentials” will not be the primary means of higher education; instead, there “will be community-building learning centers linked to health development and work systems, enabling communication across media, channels and modes and embracing diverse sets of talents” (“Work” 241). For Heath, this kind of institution provides education based on the needs of the community. In fact, her whole point rests on the very commonsensical assertion that “[p]eople segment their periods of reading and writing across their lives according to perceived personal needs” (“Work” 231). So, for Heath, in opposition to Berlin, people should get the education they feel they need, that prepares them to be active members of their community, and not critics of the community per se, although Heath never discounts critique as a possibility for these new kinds of educational institutions. Heath describes three examples of such outreach programs that she has come across that exemplify the new educational institution: Liberty Theater where at-risk inner city youth are preparing a forty-five minute play to be performed for other children under the auspices of the city park service; a large state university where the dissatisfied custodial staff demands a literacy course wherein instead of exploring “civic literacy” skills they try to meet their members’ “aesthetic, spiritual, and emotional needs”; a national chemical corporation in which after
88 downsizing and a change in the communications structure, the smaller work force found it necessary to ask a community college to give guidance in “report writing, planning strategies, efficient uses of conference time, and collaborative talk sessions” (“Work” 227-30). For Heath, the value of such programs lies in how [i]n the new settings, these groups enable writers to merge formal and informal writing across genres, audiences, and institutional and personal contexts. They allow learners to use writing and reading as critical expressions of social self-understandings. They permit learners to make their own choices about taking these understandings forward for different kinds of advancement and achievement in a variety of types of institutions. These efforts are not purely or even primarily academic, but they are vocational, community-building, health-improving, and spirit-renewing. (“Work” 231) The key point about this kind of learning is that it takes place on demand; indeed, that it is need- based and thus conceived of by the participants as necessary work. As such, this type of pedagogy is skills-based with an eye toward improving a person’s capacity for work. The aim is to develop the skills needed to create sufficient improvement, which Heath lists as “networking, developing tools of self-assessment, keen observational skills, and the ability to think clearly and plan ahead on the basis of fairly assessed information” (“Work” 235). These kinds of skills make it possible, according to Heath, for “those who begin working for others in service jobs, such as restaurant workers, tour guides, janitors, hairdressers, house cleaners, gardeners, and repair personnel, to gain experience and, with sufficient improvement, can look forward to having control of their own businesses” (“Work” 235). Heath’s representation of the future of composition also recognizes a changing commitment to the job of composition. Because of the transformations in education by outreach and continuing education programs, the vision of the work we do in composition must change to a vision of “interlinking institutions”: Just as we have seen ourselves cross disciplines, now we will watch more and more of us move across institutions and departments. In these efforts we will see ourselves moving from a single channeled focus on writing to multiple-channeled foci on symbolic systems--encouraging and thinking of speaking and acting across genres and contexts as well as writing across these with a variety of traditional tools plus new possibilities from electronic media. Ours will become a field of communicative and visual arts. (“Work” 240) Here, the function of pedagogy resembles Worsham’s claim about one of the features of the second version of the pedagogical imperative: “Schools will no longer be the sole provider of education but must join in partnership with business and media” (“Rhetoric” 405). In addition, while Heath cannot be said to be “abandon[ing] the role of education as an agency for social melioration,” her focus takes on the feature of defining literacy practices in terms of “individual learning” and garnering the ability of students in “learning how to learn” (Worsham “Rhetoric” 405). Heath’s effort, I would argue, tries to cut into what Worsham called the “ambivalence” created by the double bind of the pedagogical imperative. She is trying to contain what we might call a future of institutional pathologies like paranoia, hebephrenia, catatonia, and schizophrenia (to use Bateson's terms from Chapter 1). However, Heath’s call for a “field of communicative and visual arts” offers students a means into the current economy without a means for resistance to that economy. While Worsham would turn to a metatheoretical critique of the positions occupied by Berlin and Heath, Bruce Horner, in his article “Traditions and Professionalization: Reconceiving
89 Work in Composition,” suggests that approaches like those of Berlin and Heath further the belittling of tradition in writing instruction. In the service of the professionalization of the discipline, such approaches lead to the disavowal and devaluation of the traditional practices of composition, namely teaching writing. Horner’s primary point is to show how traditional knowledge in composition is marginalized as useless knowledge. This is so because traditional knowledge appears in these accounts as a manifestation of composition’s marginal relationship in the academy. For Horner, the knowledge of composition is not overly differentiated from “public” knowledge by these approaches, and as a result compositionists are always looking elsewhere other than their own traditions to deal with issues facing the profession. Horner argues that it is useful to see this kind of traditional knowledge as “working knowledge,” which is a product of “unskilled workers” endeavoring to “invest their own work activity with meaning” (Kusterer cited in Horner 371). The aim of this working knowledge consists in workers “learning the working knowledge and building the work relationships that add to their own control over work processes, [so as to decrease] their social isolation, and make their work meaningful” (Kusterer cited in Horner 371 brackets in original). The problem is that management doesn’t recognize “working knowledge” and tends to only toss it by the wayside in their endeavor to increase profit. Horner suggests that there is an analogy between this endeavor by management to get rid of “working knowledge” and composition’s desire to increase its exchange value “as a site for disciplinary knowledge” and thus “advocate the abolition of freshman composition or basic writing.” For Horner, “[s]uch arguments do not recognize the significance to academic life and the life of the academy of its teachers’ and students’ working knowledge” (“Traditions” 372). For Horner, the import of “working knowledge” comes down to the distinction between exchange value and use value. Horner goes to great pains to show that use value and exchange value are located in the commodity produced, and because of that there is a “continuing potential of use value of that work even in its commodified form” (“Traditions” 372). The problem becomes how to recognize the use value of the work put into a commodity, and the potential of use value, when as Marx suggests, “use values are only realized in use” (cited in Horner “Traditions” 373). Horner again builds a relationship here to arguments current in composition, particularly arguments for the abolition of composition, and in favor of teaching writing as an art rather than as skills: like traditional working knowledge, [use-values] go unrecognized, appearing and realized only in the instance of their use, in specific, immediate material social circumstances. Moreover, because the use value of a commodity resides in the commodity, it is often mistaken for the commodity’s exchange value. Debates about writing skills exemplify this confusion. Viewing writing skills in the abstract, and sensitive to the commodification of writing skills for their economic exchange value in the labor market, some argue against teaching skills as pandering to and complicit with exploitative, alienating social relations (as in certain abolitionist arguments). As an alternative, some promote teaching writing as an ‘art’ or ‘process’ rather than marketable skills to de- emphasize its use value.... But this de-emphasis of the use value of writing simply substitutes for the economic capitalization of writing skills the production of cultural capital and its exchange value, and so is no less complicit in the commodification of writing: in place of writing ‘skills,’ we have the production of works of ‘art,’ say, or more recently, the production of politically leftist attitudes. ("Traditions" 373) Here, Horner is pointing to what is, perhaps, the fundamental antinomy in composition portrayed
90 by Worsham as the two sides to the pedagogical imperative: whether we teach writing as a skill, an art, or a process, we are caught up in complicity with the social and economic regime we wish to decry because, depending on our position, we recognize “only the use value of one curriculum and only the exchange value of another” ("Traditions" 373). For Horner, the idea of “continuing potential use value” of a commodity relates specifically to the idea that a commodity, such as writing skills, has the capacity to be used differently in different contexts. In terms of “working knowledge,” or tradition, this means that the purpose of working knowledge and tradition is to be rethought in relation to the contingent demands of a learning event. Horner writes: “Students and teachers have a practical knowledge of their role and capacity to both reproduce and change language, and so culture” (388). This is an argument that recognizes students and teachers as active agents in the production of society: Composition faculty who understand writing classrooms as working at the point of production of society could align with public constituencies in redefining and pursuing the public good in their work with students, resisting reductively utilitarian definitions of those goods in terms of ‘growth’ and the production of exchange value--e.g., in terms of the production of marketable skills or other forms of privately held cultural capital--and fighting for education’s--and writing’s--use value for and by the public. (“Traditions” 394) For Horner, the emphasis on working knowledge is ultimately to displace reliance on skills. In this he follows Kusterer in recognizing working knowledge not as a set of skills to be put to use, but more as strategies that come from four kinds of workplace knowledge: “knowledge of variable properties, materials, or documents processed; knowledge of revisable and potentially manipulable aspects of the equipment or machinery; knowledge of patterns of client or customer behavior; knowledge of patterns of work behavior of others in the work organization, especially including managers” (133). For Kusterer, these kinds of working knowledge are diagnostic and prescriptive, which is to say they are about problem-identifying and problem-solving. For Horner, this kind of working knowledge translates into use value as a means to “(re)producing and changing language and culture” (“Traditions” 388). The ultimate goal of such an enterprise of working knowledge, then, is to mediate between academic and nonacademic knowledge that allows the “critical re-thinking of one’s life experience and the culture at large” (392). At this point a question could be raised about Horner’s turn to work, or labor, as the means to his investigation when he could just as easily turn to Cultural Studies, or analyses of rhetorical knowledge in contemporary education. For my part, I am sympathetic to Horner's analysis because cultural studies and rhetorical knowledge strike me as being at one remove from the affective and conceptual relations that orient experience. In the end, Berlin, Heath, and Horner are all pointing to something very explicit about the current state of teaching in the era of contemporary capitalism: what is produced in a writing class by students and teachers in their work is not the products of writing but something that exceeds the products of writing—social relations. Horner is much clearer about this in his later book derived from his many articles on the changing face of work in contemporary composition. Throughout his book, Terms of Work For Composition: A Materialist Critique, Horner revisits the question of what the subject of composition is and much like George Stade finds the subject of composition to be the writing student writing. As Horner puts it “[t]he student’s work is not…located in these papers but in [the] mediation of social relations as they occur in the practices of [the] writing of others and in my and (and…fellow students) mediation of those papers in reading them in particular ways” (Terms 250). Horner constructs this negotiation
91 between the student, himself, and fellow students as a negotiation between the use value and the exchange value of the text, pointing out once again that commodification doesn’t exhaust the use-value of the text. This is to say, that much like traditional knowledge the commodity can be recuperated for other purposes. The recuperation in this case effects a transformation of the student: “the student is producing different versions of [self] as a student in response to the changing conditions of [their] life in the course” (Terms 250). In the end, one clear difference emerges between Berlin, Heath, and Horner. While Berlin and Heath are seeking ways to make composition more viable outside the academy, Berlin by creating certain kinds of critical citizens and Heath by creating a direct engagement with communities outside the academy, Horner is more interested in ways to make composition more viable within the academy. Horner, then, instead of taking us out of the double bind of the pedagogical imperative only succeeds at intensifying it. His reconceptualization of work in composition shows, to a certain extent, his commitment to the Spellmeyer principle I discussed in Chapter 3. As in Spellmeyer's analysis, the student as epistemological subject precedes the relations which constitute the student. The dialectic appears again as a continuous negotiated tension between oppositions—in this case, use value and exchange value. It is this construction of use value and exchange value that leads to the primary concern I have with Horner's construction the work of composition: to argue that commodification doesn’t exhaust use value implies that we can get out of the cycle of capitalist exchange--which is to say that there is some kind of use value that is not captured by exchange value. This is a point I would disagree with for one primary reason: it operates under the assumption that the practices of industrial capital, or Fordism, are still dominant. In the current phase of capital, defined as the phase of real subsumption by Antonio Negri, the object of capitalist appropriation is not labor power but life itself. This means that capital captures everything and nothing can get outside of its circuits of exchange.
92 Chapter Seven Affect, Value and the Work of Becoming Real Subsumption: Affect Becomes The Measure Of Value What does it mean that we can’t get out of this model of capitalist exchange? As Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri put it, “Marx uses the term formal subsumption to name processes whereby capital incorporates under its own relations of production laboring practices that originated outside its domain” (Empire 255). Examples of such formal subsumption would include the development of hospitals to deal with caring for the ill, the development of retirement communities to deal with the care of the elderly, and the development of schools to deal with education the young. The results of such institutions are to extend “the domain of capitalist production and capitalist markets” (Empire 255). But beyond that, according to Hardt and Negri, the formal subsumption of capital also leads to the development of “conditions of liberation and struggle” that only a new phase of “real subsumption” could control. Real subsumption is best understood, not as a "product" of formal subsumption, but as a break or rupture because of the need for new forms of control in the face of new challenges to capital based on liberatory struggle. For Hardt and Negri “[t]hrough the real subsumption, the integration of labor into capital becomes more intensive than extensive and society is ever more completely fashioned by capital” (Empire 255). In sum, under the phase of real subsumption everything is subject to capital accumulation. The results of real subsumption lead to a dramatic change in the nature of employment, primarily the movement in industrialized countries like the United States from industry to service jobs. It is this movement that compositionists like Berlin and Heath want us to recognize and deal with as the changing conditions of the culture we live in. As Michael Hardt points out, the term “service” is not easy to pin down; it can refer to numerous activities “from health care, education, and finance, to transportation, entertainment, and advertising” (“Affective” 91). According to Hardt these jobs are characterized by high mobility and require flexible skills, but he adds, “more importantly, they are characterized in general by the central role played by knowledge, information, communication, and affect” in the production process. For Hardt this means the best way to describe the new postindustrial economy is as an “informational economy” (91). In such an economy, work becomes transformed to represent what Maurizio Lazzarato calls “immaterial labor...the labor that produces the informational and cultural content of the commodity” (133). Michael Hardt, in his article “Affective Labor,” recognizes three types of immaterial labor: The first is involved in an industrial production that has become informationalized and has incorporated communication technologies in a way that transforms the industrial production process itself. Manufacturing is regarded as a service, and the material labor of the production of durable goods mixes with and tends towards immaterial labor. The second is the immaterial labor of analytical and symbolic tasks, which itself breaks down into creative and intelligent manipulation, on one hand, and routine symbolic tasks, on the other. Finally, a third type of immaterial labor involves the production and manipulation of affects and requires (virtual or actual) human contact or proximity. (98- 9) For Hardt, the first type of immaterial labor is best exemplified by what he calls Toyotism, which is defined against the typical Fordist model of the mass production of standardized commodities. Toyotism is a model of production whereby productive decisions are made through direct
93 communication markets, “according to the present demand of the market” (93). According to Lazzarato, the consumer is placed inside the commodity itself through processes of communication between markets and factories. As an example of the second type of immaterial labor, Hardt uses Robert Reich’s analysis of work in The Work of Nations. In that book, Reich suggests there are three types of service jobs in the current economy: routine production services, in service jobs, and symbolic- analytical services. Symbolic-analytical services involve such skills as problem-solving, problem-identifying, and strategic-brokering activities (177). For Hardt, it is symbolic-analytical services that best represent the second type of immaterial labor. What is most interesting about Reich’s category of symbolic-analytic services is how closely the skills or required knowledge that a symbolic analyst needs to be successful bear a striking resemblance to the skills that Horner (through Kusterer), Berlin, and Heath see as necessary to prepare students for the new economy, with one exception. I think it would be fruitful to look at this resemblance. Remember that Berlin saw such skills that lead to the development of “excellent communicators, quick and flexible learners, and cooperative collaborators” (“Work” 222) as necessary for students in the current economy. Heath also stresses developing similar capacities under the heading of “oral communicative and interpersonal skills... networking, developing tools of self-assessment, keen observational skills, and the ability to think clearly and plan ahead on the basis of fairly assessed information” (“Work” 235). In addition to these skills both Berlin and Heath emphasize the need for preparation in thinking about systems: for Berlin “abstract and systemic thinking” is necessary to help students make sense of their role in the current “postmodern” society (“Work” 223); for Heath the need to see a move “from a single-channel focus on writing to multiple-channeled foci on symbolic systems” (Heath “Work” 240) would help in developing a multiplicity of literacy strategies to help foment community building and advancement up the economic ladder. Horner’s advocacy of Kusterer’s idea of “working knowledge” carries with it Kusterer’s understanding of the four kinds of knowledge which can lead to diagnostic and prescriptive action on the part of workers, as either problem-identifying or problem-solving. Reich lays out four particular skills that the symbolic analyst will need: abstraction, systems thinking, experimentation, and collaboration (229). Reich goes into much more detail than Berlin, Heath, and Horner in describing the practices that can affirm these skills, which is slightly ironic considering that Reich is an economist and the others are theorists and practitioners of the teaching of writing. For example, under “abstraction” Reich says the student is “taught to get behind the data--to ask why certain facts have been selected, why they are assumed to be important, and how they might be contradicted” (230). For systems thinking, Reich suggests that students are taught that “problems can be usually redefined according to where you look in a broad system of forces, variables and outcomes, and that unexpected relationships and potential solutions can be discovered by examining this larger terrain” (231). Reich’s view of collaboration could be found in a composition text that is describing the values of peer review: Students learn to articulate, clarify, and then restate for one another how they identify and solve problems. They learn to seek and accept criticism form peers, solicit help, and give credit to others. They also learn to negotiate--to explain their own needs and view things form others perspectives, and to discover mutually beneficial resolutions. (233) There are many points of overlap between the skills Reich delineates and the ones offered by Berlin, Heath, and Horner. The question that arises is a simple one: if this diverse group of
94 people are in agreement about the basic skills necessary that will allow students to become successful, why not just teach these basic skills? The answer to this question is the real starting point for the reconstruction of work along ontological and affective lines. Berlin’s suggestion that we need to do more than teach students how to be successful in the current market is an important point. Heath’s emphasis that these skills be taught in ways that emphasize community building is another important point. Horner’s suggestion that the skills that make up working knowledge can be used as a way to resist hegemonic formations is also important. However, I think, they don’t go far enough. All of these proposals rest on one primary assumption: if you increase the value of a student's work, you will increase their power to act in the world. For Berlin and Horner, the way you increase the value of the student's work is through strategies of critique and resistance. For Heath it’s through empowerment brought about through the teaching of needed skills on demand, by giving students control over their curriculum. In sum, Berlin, Heath, and Horner recognize the really important point that the work students do, and by relation the work that teachers do, is primarily the production of the social realm. However, by tying it to the production of value, whether as exchange value or use value, they fail to recognize the full impact of the phase of real subsumption. The full impact of the phase of real subsumption demands that we recognize the role of affect in the current economy. When Hardt describes affect as the third kind, or type, of immaterial labor, he has in mind the way that services--from fast food industries to the entertainment industries--take the creation and manipulation of affects as their point of departure. Why does affect enter into this concern over labor? In point of fact, I would suggest, it has always already been there. If we look at the skills set out by Berlin, Heath and Horner again, we can see this: communication skills, networking skills, collaboration skills, all require the creation and manipulation of affects. Moreover, when Berlin suggests that one should learn critique as well as job skills, he suggests our students need guidance in the “creation and fulfillment of desire by the media.” Heath, in her review of continuing or outreach education models, recognizes some of the key components of such projects as “affective,” that is, “as responding to personal, spiritual, and civic needs.” Horner, as well, uses examples of similar kinds of outreach programs, citing Ann Ruggles Gere’s report on community writing workshops as showing participants to “have valued writing especially for its ability to give them courage, improve their self-esteem, help them think about their personal relationships, and alter the material conditions of their lives” (“Traditions” 393). That is to say, writing helps them to deal with their affective struggles. So why, if affect is already there, then why don’t these thinkers make more of it? Because, they have made the point of composition to be the production of value. But in the phase of real subsumption, where there is no division between the economic and the cultural, where the “instrumental action of economic production has merged with the communicative action of human relations” (Hardt “Affective” 96), affect induces value and not the other way around. Antonio Negri, in his article “Value and Affect,” makes clear that the result of the phase of the real subsumption is that value has become immeasurable because there is no clear reference point outside of capital whereby one could ground any understanding of value. Because of this, Negri says, political economy recognizes that “value is now an investment of desire” and it must set its “theory in the terrain marked out by the production of subjectivity” (86-7). Political economy, then, in order to control the conditions of production economically and socially must become in Negri’s words “a deontological science” establishing convention, understood as “the set of productive modes of life and exchange” as a means to control the
95 immeasurability of affect-value. One clear way of understanding this is in the current battles over “obesity” developed through the coordination of the government, the medical industry, the news and entertainment media, and picked up on quickly by the fast food industry. “Obesity,” or being overweight, has become the disease of the moment and has been tied to a lack of “fitness” which is to be understood both in terms of bodily and moral activity. The government’s concern in the current “obesity crisis” is developed around rising health costs and lost productivity and wages. The news and entertainment industry foments the crisis primarily through pencil thin talking heads moralizing over the causes of obesity. These talking heads often reduce the issues of obesity to poor eating habits and a lack of proper exercise. Some have gone as far as to blame the fast food industry resulting in menu changes including breadless sandwiches and salads. In the schools, obesity has joined the list of items that seriously curtails the development of self- esteem in children and adolescents. The result of such interventions into American society’s eating habits continues to be the demonization of overweight people who are told they should exercise more control over their lives, effectively turning the issue into a kind of psychological problem at best and a moral problem at worst. These social forces have collectively served to create two kinds of subjects: obese subjects and fit subjects. The fit subjects have been given pride of place morally, aesthetically, and psychologically. Political economy has then intervened into, not just the lives, but the bodies of people in order to try and establish conventions for productivity by trying to re-route people's desires. Capital codes and over codes desire with these “deontological” duties for healthiness. Health, itself, has become the newest measure for capital. Against the endeavor to code affect, Negri is quick to point out that the problematic of affect-value in the current socio-economic phase as immeasurable also means that it is “beyond measure,” so affect-value doesn’t so much escape from the political economy as much as it offers ways to reappropriate the conventionalized modes of life and exchange by producing subjectivity differently (Negri “Value” 99-100). For Negri, the subject is always a “social” subject. By producing subjectivity he does not mean the production of individuality, nor does he mean the production of a “change agent.” He is interested rather in what we could call, inspired by the Spinozist assemblage, processes of collective individuation whereby bodies combine affectively with other bodies to increase their affective capacity for existence. Here, we must ask the most basic question of all: how can affect do this? And how can it do it within the pedagogical domain of a composition classroom? One way to do it is to start thinking of the kind of work teachers and students do in composition as affective labor. Hardt, in his elaboration of affective labor, ties it to feminist concerns of analyses of women’s work, calling it “labor in the bodily mode” (96). However, Hardt is also concerned to show that “labor in the bodily mode,” like caring labor, kin-work, and biological reproduction, are not essential aspects of women as beings in the world. Rather, it is political economy through the formation of conventions that makes these categories of work seem essential to women. That is to say, the processes of political economy in its attempt to control affect codes these traditional forms of women’s work. The important point to recognize, according to Hardt, is that although “caring labor is certainly entirely immersed in the corporeal...the affects it produces are nonetheless immaterial. What affective labor produces are social networks, forms of community, biopower” (96). It is here, in the way that the production and reproduction of affects produces “collective subjectivities” and “sociality” that there is “enormous potential in affective labor” regardless of the fact that such collectivities and sociality are directly exploitable by capital (96-7).
96 For Hardt, biopower is the creation of life, not in the sense of procreation, but in the sense of the “production of collective subjectivities, sociality, and society itself” through “the production and reproduction of affects” (98). Michel Foucault is best known as the theorist of biopower. However, according to Hardt, Foucault’s understanding of biopower occurs from above, from the perspective of “sovereign power” where the central concern is the “production of life...that is the creation, management and control of populations” (98). For Hardt, we need to look at biopower from “below...from the perspective of labor involved in biopolitical production” (98). As such, biopolitical production, understood as the production and reproduction of affects, points to the breakdown in the distinctions between production, reproduction, culture, and the economy, and changes the way we understand labor. Hardt writes: labor works directly on the affects; it produces subjectivity, it produces society, it produces life. Affective labor, in this sense, is ontological--it reveals living labor constituting a form of life and thus again demonstrates the potential of biopolitical production. (99) Affective labor is caught in a cycle of permanent antagonism between Foucault’s version of biopower from above and Hardt’s version of biopower from below. There is no possibility for a dialectical sublation of these two versions of biopower. The strategy we are left with is a strategy that produces life in more diverse modes, a production process that requires that we understand the ontological constitution of the worker as a subject, and how that subject is constituted is related entirely to the affects the subject produces and reproduces; that is, the affects of which it is capable. At the core of all of these understandings of labor and the laboring subject is the question of freedom. Horner, Heath, and Berlin are all interested in making composition a space where students and teachers can increase their liberty through collective realization of the conditions of oppression that subjugate them. But each of them, in their own way, turns to practices of intervention (Berlin turns to critique, Heath to skills, Horner to use-value) to reground freedom as a value to be attained. And I would add, as a value to be attained through knowledge. Central to their projects, and I would argue to the current thinking in composition studies, is an epistemological prejudice that holds that only an increase in or transformation of knowledge, usually understood as changing a student’s language as implied by thinkers like Harris and Horner and a host of others, is productive of freedom. In a society reoriented economically towards the production and reproduction of information and communication this would seem to be the way to go. And in the discipline of composition which focuses on the production of text, it seems necessary to make knowledge the primary economic resource. Hardt critiques the idea that “knowledge” is and will be “the basic economic resource,” arguing that “the production of knowledge involves new kinds of means of production and labor” (95)17. Berlin, Heath, and Horner recognize that work is productive of the social, and that the work of composition can be conceived of as a form of social production. But their epistemological prejudice, coupled with their failure to recognize the current phase of real subsumption, leaves them unable to recognize affect as the “basic economic resource” and the role of ontology in untangling the problematic of labor. Rethinking Standpoints: Irony And Self-Valorization How do we translate this insight into productive pedagogy? In my own case, I hope to translate my many failures of trying to bring the problematic of the ontological to the forefront of composition studies into effective teaching practices. My problem so far has been that I have not
17 In writing this, Hardt is offering a criticism of Peter Drucker’s ideas in his book Post-Capitalist Society. 97 been able to fully understand how my commitment to unlearning as a primary strategy or tactic leads to sociability. Kathi Weeks, an astute reader of Negri and Deleuze, provides a way to think of such a project. Weeks, in Constituting Feminist Subjects, is seeking a way to bring the feminist engagement with standpoint theory into a productive dialogue with what has come the be called the post-Marxist direction of thinkers like Deleuze and Negri. While she is writing before Hardt and Negri’s Empire appeared in 2000, she seems presciently aware of the critiques of that text by feminists like Claire Colebrook and others, who argue that Hardt and Negri’s version of the affective laborer is decidedly embodied male. Colebrook’s point is that while one can recognize that relationality and affect precede embodiment, they are still coagulated into the lived experience of materially sexed bodies, and one could say other kinds of bodies as well (e.g. racialized bodies, disabled bodies, obese bodies, and so forth). In order to make this connection Weeks develops a relationship between discussions of standpoint theory and labor, and treats both in terms of an ontological problematic. This is reminiscent of Susan Jarratt and Nedra Reynolds’ endeavor to recuperate a version of standpoint theory in their reconceptualization of ethos, a move that was critiqued by Michelle Bailiff. What becomes important and pertinent for our discussion here is how it is that Weeks escapes the charge of expressivism leveled by Bailiff against Jarratt and Reynolds. First and foremost, it is important to point out that for Jarratt and Reynolds, the standpoint they adopt is completely resistant of any ontological determinations, whether expressive or otherwise. I think Bailiff relies too much on transforming Jarratt and Reynolds’ social constructivist stance into a pre-existing embodied presence. On the other hand, while Jarrett and Reynolds are very interested in historicizing discursive elements and analyzing how that history functions to make possible stances, or in their terms, an ethos, they make a limited use of temporality, perhaps because of their epistemological prejudice. This is to say that they emphasize location over time. Jarratt and Reynolds write: “Despite our reservations about some forms of standpoint theory, we find that, collectively, the ideas of place, position, and standpoint in feminist theory offer us a way of re-conceiving ethos as an ethical political tool—as a way of claiming and taking responsibility for our positions in the world, for the ways we see, for the places from which we speak” (52). In addition, while Jarratt and Reynolds call for a reconceptualization of the subject in terms of the subject being constituted by multiple selves, these selves are produced as a function of interiority with clear boundaries: that is as bounded entities. Jarratt and Reynolds write that they want students “to identify themselves and those to whom they write and speak within networks of gender, class, and power. In discovering the differences between themselves and within their multiple ‘selves,’ in fashioning discourses which build on specific points of commonality with audiences, they both split and resuture textual selves” (57). Here, Jarratt and Reynolds succeed in complicating the interior lives of bodies, but their use of terms establishing subjects “within” networks as locations and the differences “within” their multiple selves only makes of subjectivity a collection of little subjectivities. According to Deleuze, what splits the subject is not the recognition of differences as opposition or sameness, but the immanent force of time which creates a focus on difference in itself. For the Spinozist position adopted by Deleuze, Gatens, and others, Jarratt and Reynold’s reconceptualization of ethos succeeds in creating molar sites of capture. In the end, what I am suggesting is that Jarratt and Reynolds rethinking of ethos as “haunts” in the nominal be extended to thinking about “haunts” as a verb. Weeks, on the other hand, recognizes the issue of the necessity of an immanent time in both laboring and the production of a feminist standpoint: labour is conceived in my account as an immanent ontological dynamic. As Marx
98 describes it, ‘[l]abour is the living, form-giving fire: it is the transitoriness of things, their temporality, as their formation by living time’ (Grundrisse 361)….Dorothy Smith describes the ontological assumptions of her standpoint theory in very similar terms: ‘These practices, these objects, our world, are continually created again and again and are already social. Because they arise in actual activities, they are always coming into being as a local historical process, falling away behind us as we move forward into the future. They are being brought into being’ (Smith 125). (122-3) At the cornerstone of this version of labor as a relational ontology is Weeks’ Deleuze-inspired reading of the Nietzschean concept of the “will to power” discussed above. “Like the will to power,” Weeks claims, “labor is a claim about existence, about the constitutive force of practices, rather than a claim about the essence of things….labor serves as an immanent creative principle in the service of specific historical problematics” (123). Weeks also argues that the ontology of labor is more than just a philosophical concern; it also has practical and strategic purposes. For her, the practical and the strategic purposes revolve around the notion that labor is “value creating activity” (124).18 Weeks writes “labor is a category that enables us to acknowledge our historical immanence and to recognize the determined dimensions of social life while simultaneously affirming the creative force of the will” (125). The problem with such a conceptualization is that it is open to charges of essentialism or expressivism, as for example Baillif’s charges against Jarratt and Reynolds. In addition, while admiring some aspects of performative theory as developed by Judith Butler, Weeks does not consider Butler’s position as a solution to the problem of the production of social subjectivity. Weeks’ main concern is that the critiques of standpoint theory by performative theorists like Butler leave bodies without any ontological status at all. Weeks is critical of Butler’s primary starting point, Butler’s analysis of the Nietzschean statement in the Genealogy of Morals that there is no “doer behind the deed, but that the ‘doer’ is variably constructed in and through the deed” (quoted in Weeks 130). For Weeks, Butler misses the point: “although the idea of a doer behind the deed is clearly a fiction, an illusion, we could still maintain that there is an immanent doer in the deed; that is we can reject the a priori subject without rejecting the subject altogether” (130). Weeks continues in a typical deconstructive fashion by showing that when Butler claims that if “identity as an effect is ‘neither fatally determined nor fully artificial and arbitrary’" as Butler would say , then "[o]ne could thus conclude that it is a substantive—though certainly precarious—being-effect that is performatively produced" therefore, "the subject does carry a certain ontological weight” (130). Weeks point is that there is the possibility of a constitutive ontological subject within the work of Butler, but that Butler forecloses on this determination through the construction of an anti- ontological stance which divides gender identity into expressive and performative models. For Weeks such a determination is too easy because “the opposition between the expressive and the performative is grafted onto the opposition between the necessary and the contingent…[which] effectively reduce our choices to two: gender identity as necessary cause or gender as contingent effect” (131). To a certain extent, one can see the sub/versive tradition of Vitanza, Baillif, Johnson and others in this kind of dichotomizing. One of the problems with the sub/versive tradition, as is clearly pointed out by Worsham, is that its practitioners fail to recognize, like Butler, what Weeks calls “more nuanced distinctions” (131). It is these nuanced
18 Weeks bases her claim on labor as value creating activity on the work of Hardt and Negri’s precursor to Empire, The Labor of Dionysus. In this book, Negri had not fully worked out his deconstruction of value as a precursor to affect and subject to capitalist command. 99 distinctions which help to make possible the relational ontology that guides Weeks’ connection of standpoint theory to labor. The benefit of standpoint theory over the performative model for Weeks rests on the fact that the standpoint model “acknowledges the substantive effect of gender practices”: These practices, these repetitions, leave complex marks or traces that produce something on the order of a second nature, or a constructed contingent necessity….The key point is that it is possible to recognize certain complex densities that accumulate over time without conceiving them in terms of an absolutely intractable depth or fixed interiority….Unlike the anti-ontological performative model, the laboring subject accumulates ontological weight without acquiring a transcendental stability. (133) This model of the standpoint theory built on an immanent ontology of labor is remarkably reminiscent of Deleuze’s concept of the fold mentioned above whereby “subjectivication is created by folding” (Fold 104). While many have found the fold useful to explain governmentality in the Foucauldian sense,19 it falls short in many accounts as a way to understand the role of resistance by particular bodies, as such resistance would concern the production of alternative viewpoints. As Weeks implies, the question is how one moves from within this ontology to politics. For the laboring subject--redefined as the subject capable of producing affect and sociability--it becomes a question of how one creates affects that are productive of sociality. Weeks returns again to Deleuze’s understanding of Nietzsche’s will to power as ontological force which carries with it an ethical principle of critique as a selection of difference over sameness or identity as discussed above in Chapter 5. Weeks explains how this affects her theory: This selection is not an act of ‘free will’ or ‘self-determination,’ as if there were a will or a self that were radically free to determine who to will to be. Moreover, this selection is the work not of reflection but of practice; that is we do not just think what to be, we enact it in word and deed….To build on the Nietzschean model, this selection is a process that is simultaneously deconstitutive and constitutive; specifically, we selectively will that which is active over that which is reactive, that which enables us to do and be more over that which would limit or separate us from what we can do or be, that which augments our power over what detracts from it. (137) We can clearly see in Weeks' idea of the laboring subject the influence of the Spinozist assemblage. Weeks continues by identifying “two kinds of selective practices that can be used to construct a feminist standpoint,” or for my purposes, an immanent ontological ethos: irony and self-valorization. Following in a long line of feminist scholars who have valued irony as a means to resistance, Weeks cites Kathy Ferguson, Nancy Walker, Sheila Rowbotham, as well as the lesbian produced magazine On Our Backs.20 Weeks is, however, cautious about the value of
19 Nikolas Rose uses the Deleuzian concept of the fold to explain away the necessity of theories of agency as it relates to what he calls “psy-disciplines” in Inventing Our Selves: Psychology Power Personhood, and William E. Connolly develops the concept as a way to understand the multi-layered character of being that incorporates biology, nature, and culture, but in itself is not sufficient to create what Connolly calls an ethos of critical responsiveness in Why I Am not A Secularist and Neuropolitics. I discussed the work of Elspeth Probyn in relationship to the fold concept in Chapter 4. 20 It is curious to me, given Weeks familiarity with Deleuze, her lack of engagement with Deleuze’s distinction in Logic of Sense between irony as productive of depth and hence a kind of interiority, and humor as something that mobilizes the surface. In “Nomadic Thought” Deleuze goes back on this distinction saying that “the surface-depth opposition no longer concerns me. What interests me now is the relationship between a full body, a body without 100 irony to do the work of the reconstitution of being. She wants to narrow it to a conception of “self-laughter,” derived once again from Nietzsche, which “helps us to put the self in perspective; it is a sign of irreverence and a practice of destabilization that can serve…as a force of negation or deconstitution….self laughter can be seen as a means to disarm or neutralize aspects of the self without invoking ressentiment or bad conscience” (138). Weeks is clear that she sees irony only as one means for the production of resistance, but finds it useful because it has the capacity to “refuse the path of denial” and thus “avoid the usual pitfalls of an oppositional stance” (139, emphasis in original). As Weeks presents it, irony serves three fundamental functions: first, irony can be used “against that which we are not”; second, irony “can be used against that which we are but do not want to be”; and third, “irony can be used to disengage from political strategies of polar opposition informed by the logic of ressentiment and the reactive conceptions of identity in which they are grounded” (140). While the first two strategies of irony are fairly self- explanatory, the third needs further elaboration. To explain her position on the third version of irony, Weeks turns to On Our Backs which she identifies as a “sex magazine for Lesbians.” Weeks reads a satirical account of a fictionalized encounter between a “lesbian-feminist support group” and a feminist anti-porn group, titled “April 1, 1984.” While Weeks doesn’t go out of her way to mention it, the title of the piece is highly instructive as it invokes both April Fool’s Day in concert with Orwellian visions of a nightmare future. But more so, I would think, it also invokes the Orwell of “The Politics of the English Language” which implies one can know where they stand if they just were capable of holding on to and “correctly using” consensual definitions of agreed upon terms. In any case, for Weeks the primary concern is how irony asserts a “doubleness” of the figure of the “feminist ‘on her back’—that problematizes stereotypical and one-dimensional conceptions of identity, as in this case an identity that is either politically committed or sexually active” (141 italics in text). The strength of the magazine for Weeks lies in how it is oppositional without simply reaffirming an unproblematized oppositional stance: On Our Backs manages to reveal the reactive logic that informs some anti-porn discourse without…simply recreating the pro-porn position: obviously they are not representing ideas, acts, and passions that conform to the acceptable range of female sexual practices; clearly they are not affirming themselves as objects of male desire. Indeed, the laughter arises from the fact that they are beyond these traditional oppositions. (141) Irony then, as “ironic self-reference,” provides a way “to disable that which cannot be refused” and “displaces denial” (142). Such ironic self-reference is productive of an ethos that “involves clearing away worn-out and dated ideals and images, recognizing without valorizing the scars that domination leaves, and disengaging from reactive oppositions” (142). Ironic self-reference, then, is a means to enact the destructive side of the critical endeavor by negating the control of the dominant affective system that orders and organizes our bodies. Weeks is convinced that irony serves a completely destructive purpose and not a constructive purpose as argued for in the work of Kathy Ferguson, for example. For her purposes negation and affirmation must be seen as separate processes and not as a form of dialectical interaction which creates a kind of sublation into a synthesis where the residue of that which is negated is carried over into the
organs, and flows that migrate” (Desert 261). What we can take from this is that Deleuze feels that his theory of immanence has become complete and irony is no longer in danger of slipping into depth but now irony and humor work together. For a fuller discussion of Deleuze’s relationship to irony, see Claire Colebrook Irony and Irony in the Work of Philosophy. 101 synthesis. It is also not an endless state of tension as described by more recent understandings of the dialectical process as defined by Horner and Lu. This follows from the Spinozist inspired dictum that Gatens is so fond of: to think differently is to exist differently. Negation can happen only at one time and in a certain manner based on its ontological configuration as a relation. If holding to a relational ontology of immanence means anything, it means that the relation precedes the terms that are thus related. In this case the ironic negation relation precedes the constitution of the subject and allows for a complete negation. If this is the case, then it becomes clear that it is necessary to have a corresponding creation or affirmation of the difference revealed in the ironic negation. For her example of the creative aspect of affirmation, what she calls the “constitutive selection,” Weeks turns to Antonio Negri’s concept of self-valorization as an attempt to “conceive an immanent resistance to capitalist relations on the part of antagonistic subjects” (147). As with irony, self-valorization is defined as a project consistent with Weeks' Deleuzian reading of the eternal return, which selects what is “active over the reactive” (146). The idea of self-valorization is defined by Negri in his reading of Marx’s Grundrisse, touted as one of the few texts where Marx theorizes the movement of capitalist social relations to communistic relations. According to Weeks, this is a text Negri uses in trying to remove from Marx humanistic and scientistic conflicts between voluntarism and determinism. To do so Negri re- analyzes Marx’s discussion of the worker’s day in terms of the conflict over how “capital seeks to increase the proportion of surplus labor over necessary labor…while the working class struggles to increase the proportion of necessary labor” (144). For Negri there are two kinds of subversion this situation creates, one destructive and one creative. The destructive form is called “refusal to work” and is consistent with typical practices like “strikes, work slowdowns, and sabotage” (147). We know that our students are already familiar with this procedure. In fact, in reference to sentences of the type “words cannot describe” I discussed in Chapter 1, we can see our students' endeavors to create “work slowdowns” and “sabotage” in their refusals to read and revise. But in a curious way, if Sidorkin is right and students own their own means of production for learning, then they only succeed in sabotaging themselves. For the creative model, which Negri terms “self-valorization,” Negri’s distinction is to shift self-valorization from the domain of capital to the domain of the working class.21 In the process, Negri reconceptualizes the working class from a specific class organized by specific kinds of laboring practices to become more inclusive of the general population under the sway of global capital—this new organization of populations Negri defines as, following Spinoza, the Multitude. To shift self-valorization from Capital to the Multitude, Weeks insists, Negri must cut ties with any notion of the dialectic and replace “the logic of negative opposition with that of active antagonism” without either a clear origin or end (145). Antagonism is to be understood as a creative and contingent logic of concrete practice which “develops within separate spaces,” capital with its logic in one realm and self-valorization within its logic in another realm. Here is where the movement Negri is associated with in Italy, Autonomia, gets its name: practices of self-valorization define “not the valorization of the self, but autonomous and collective projects of value-creating practices” (Weeks 147). The multitude, through such creative practices, carves out an antagonistic space of resistance whereby they increase their necessary labor, the labor that is productive of life itself, and not surplus labor for the benefit of capital. In terms of rethinking
21 One might say “over-turn” in the way many speak of Marx’s over-turning of Hegel’s dialectical Spiritualism in favor of a dialectical materialism. In this sense, Negri over turns self-valorization from the domain of capital to the domain of the working class. 102 feminist standpoints, Weeks concludes: “as moments of self-valorization, feminist standpoints are ongoing collective projects that cultivate the antagonistic potential and constructive possibilities of women’s value creating practices” (148). Weeks lists as the value creating practices such things as “the relational labor involved in caring for children or in creating and sustaining kinship networks and the modes of subjectivity linked to those forms of labor, which standpoints constructed around different modes of caring labor attempt to affirm and promote” (149). While I find Weeks' characterization of self-valorization as a way to extend and enhance standpoint theory productive and interesting, Negri’s deconstruction of value in “Value and Affect” calls her project somewhat into question. In a time where capital has subsumed all possible relations under its command, the idea of the production of these kinds of autonomous spaces seems to be questionable. But more so, given the ubiquity of the coding of affect as the guarantor, or the measure of value, one cannot be so quick to move to “women’s value [affect] creating practices” as not being any more than the coding of affect by Capital. Lynn Worsham’s critique of the role of “pedagogies of care” in reproducing an affective economy “which continues to affix the struggle for identity to the emotional repudiation of the maternal” (“Emotion” 123) attests to this problem. Finally, while irony is fairly concrete as a process of selection, I am not convinced that self-valorization has very clear concrete practices that translate well to the writing classroom. Becoming, Writing, And Affirmative Critique It is for these reasons that I would shift from self-valorization as the model of affirmative practice to a practice of “becoming” as developed through the work of the Spinozist Assemblage. This has a number of merits over the concept of self-valorization. First, while both self- valorization and becoming derive from the immanent, univocal ontology inspired by Spinoza (the concept of the multitude and the idea of the absolute negation to clear the ground for the creative act are both developed through Spinoza), I’m not convinced that the autonomist space of self-valorization avoids the imposition of another dualism because it is spatially composed and is productive of time (in the case of free time for necessary labor). While self-valorization begins in immanence, it strikes me as another way of instituting a model of transcendence in the production of these autonomous spaces. Becoming, then, strikes me as a more immanent practice. In addition, becoming is inspired by all of the preceding conceptualizations that I have been trying to lay out: external relations as the principle of difference underlying any encounter with experience, affect as the virtual power of increasing a body’s capacities derived from ethology, and affective labor--now seen as the double movement of critique and affirmation as a practice of becoming. Moreover, and of importance for composition, becoming is developed in relationship to writing by Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus and by Deleuze and Parnet in Dialogues. Becoming, then, should take the place of self-valorization as the second, creative selection (with irony as the first negative selection which is productive of a standpoint). Becoming, on the contrary, does not result in the production of a standpoint, feminist or otherwise. Rather it is productive of an anti-modern ethos of students (Horner’s category of the subject of composition) becoming-other (unlearning and unworking relational affects to become minoritarian). But how do we understand a concept like becoming? It is important to put this concept in the context of Deleuze’s understanding of a normative ontology. According to philosopher Todd May, Deleuze constructs his ontology as a normative practice “built upon the not-so- controversial idea that how we conceive the world is relevant to how we live in it” (295). For
103 Deleuze, the work of the philosopher is to create concepts, not to understand the world better, but to “conceive understandings that at least permit and perhaps encourage better—and alternative— ways of living in the world” (May 295). For Deleuze the dominant problematic is not what makes a good life, but how does one live in order extend life for all? Claire Colebrook puts this problematic in specific terms of Deleuze’s understanding of difference: “whether we can think difference and becoming without relying on common sense notions of identity, reason, the human subject or even ‘being.’” (Deleuze 4). Becoming, then, is a concept Deleuze creates in order to promote better and alternative ways of living, but more so, becoming, like experimentation, is a capacity within the assemblages of life itself. According to Colebrook, Deleuze’s ideas about becoming become concrete partly through his experience of writing collaboratively with Guattari and others. Far from being an absolute experiment in deconstitution, as many have read the work of Deleuze and Deleuze and Guattari, Deleuze has always expressed a kind of caution around his notion of becoming. No doubt partly inspired by Spinoza’s signet ring with the Latin “Caute” appearing on it, which can be read against the Kantian imprimatur on the Enlightenment “Sapere Aude” (dare to know), caution is the guiding protocol of becoming. Caution implies taking up a place in the middle, not from a position of origins or ends; it makes of becoming an experimenting-with, guided by sympathy as a kind of symbiosis. In Dialogues, co-written with Claire Parnet, Deleuze discusses becoming as it affects writing. For my purposes here, I want to highlight the relation between becoming and writing as writing is very important for composition studies. But more importantly, for Deleuze and Parnet, writing highlights both aspects of experimentation—experimentation that leads to capture and experimentation that leads to becoming. Deleuze and Parnet write: Writing is very simple. Either it is a way of reterritorializing oneself, conforming to a code of dominant utterances, to a territory of established states of things: not just schools and authors, but all those who write professionally, even in a non-literary sense. Or else, on the other hand it is becoming, becoming something other than a writer, since what one is becoming at the same time becomes something other than writing. (74) Writing then can be produced in terms of two modes of experimentation: one in which writers reterritorialize themselves and one in which writers follow a line of deterritorialization. The terms reterritorialization and deterritorialization are best understood in terms of identification as a process whereby a person grounds their understanding of themselves based on a series of norms derived from identifying with objects and others outside themselves. Persons thus construct territories for themselves (initial versions of standpoint theory caught up in essential configurations of woman are clear examples) from which they act in the world. Since all actions are kinds of experiments with experience, these experiments break free from these territories in “a line of flight” or a deterritorialization. Reterritorializing is a mode of readopting the norm, while deterritorialization is a way of disidentifying through working with something else which transforms both the writer and the something else. Ultimately, Deleuze and Guattari argue that all deterritorializations must return to a reterritorialization, because if they do not, bodies may end up disintegrating into schizophrenia, hebephrenia, catatonia, or paranoia. At the core of Deleuze and Parnet’s discussion of writing is the concept of assemblage. For Deleuze and Parnet, this reconfiguration of writing shifts our understanding of the minimal real unit of experience. Deleuze and Parnet write: “The minimal real unit is not the word, the idea, the concept or the signifier but the assemblage” (52). But what is an assemblage? Deleuze and Parnet develop the concept by asking that very question:
104 What is an assemblage? It is a multiplicity which is made up of many heterogeneous terms and which establishes liaisons, relations between them, across ages, sexes and reigns—different natures. Thus, the assemblage’s only unity is that of co-functioning: it is a symbiosis, a ‘sympathy.’ It is never affiliations which are important, but alliances, alloys….An animal is defined less by its genus, its species, its organs, and its functions, than by the assemblages into which it enters. (69) This return to the language of ethology is significant, because it allows us to read ethological maps as assemblages, and thus as kinds of compositions of bodies. The one difference is that Deleuze and Parnet articulate the concept of symbiosis, or sympathy, as the productive relation that enhances the capacity of a body. An increase in one’s power of acting is then another way to discuss becoming. Deleuze and Parnet offer the following example: Take an assemblage of the man-animal-manufactured object: MAN-HORSE-STIRRUP. Technologists have explained that the stirrup made possible military unity and in the knight lateral stability: the lance could be tucked in under one arm, it benefits from all the horse’s speed, acts as a point which is immobile itself but propelled by the gallop….This is new man-animal symbiosis, a new assemblage of war, defined by its degree of power or ‘freedom’, its affects, its circulation of affects: what a set of bodies is capable of. (70) For Deleuze and Parnet, such a model of assemblage is an important part of understanding what writers do. Writing is the invention of assemblages starting from the assemblages that have invented the writer (Deleuze and Parnet 52). Deleuze and Parnet go to great pains to clarify the distinction between the “author” and the “writer.” An author does not invent assemblages, but worse still the author as a “subject of enunciation” works either to create identifications with readers, or to create distance in order to criticize. Identification and distance violate the sine quae non of the assemblage: sympathy. Deleuze and Parnet reject identification and distance because “in all these cases, one is led to speak for, in the place of…One must, on the contrary, speak with, write with” (52). Writing as the invention of assemblages comes about through a process of sympathy. But how do we characterize sympathy? Deleuze and Parnet have an idiosyncratic sense of sympathy. Perhaps the best way to proceed in understanding sympathy would be to show its difference from empathy. In her book, Imaginary Bodies, Moira Gatens explores pedagogical projects in Australia to raise the awareness of male judges in dealing with rape cases, particularly rape cases between husbands and wives. Gatens reports that the endeavors to raise the consciousness of judges has much in common with John Rawls, who, in A Theory of Justice advocates taking the stance of a “representative human being” in order to reduce bias and effectively evaluate a situation. Gatens reports that while feminist scholars are generally “skeptical” of the idea of the “representative human being” because one can not separate out gender, some “defend the potential” of Rawls theory. Gatens provides an example from Susan Moller Okin: [t]hose in the original position cannot think from the position of nobody…rather, [they] think from the perspective of everybody, in the sense of each in turn. To do this requires, at the very least, strong empathy and a preparedness to listen very carefully to the very different points of view of others. (quoted in Imaginary 140) Gatens critiques Okin’s argument in terms of Spinoza’s discussion of bodies, arguing that Okin’s notion of embodiment as “limited to her or his unique occupation of space, within a single epidermal surface.” This notion denies Spinoza’s understanding of “embodiment [which] includes in a crucial and inescapable sense one’s beliefs, habits and entire context” and
105 accordingly that “[n]ew beliefs, including knowledge concerning others, cannot be acquired like possessions” (Imaginary 140). Her overall point is that we must acknowledge the “limits to empathizing with”: To fail to acknowledge the necessarily limited understanding that a given person can glean about the lives of those who are very differently situated is to cause such persons a serious violence. Considerable caution is required in thinking that one can ‘know’ (in the sense that one knows 2 + 2 = 4) how the differently embodied experience themselves or their situation. This is precisely to believe that one can step outside the social imaginary and see the truth, clearly and without distortion….Arguably what one may ‘see’ is at best the system of beliefs, the ‘imaginary’, if you like, of the other. (Imaginary 140) While Gatens emphasizes that one can not empathize because of the lack of ability to get outside of one’s own skin and inside another’s, as well as being unable to get outside the social constructs of the other, she could add to her account an explanation of how empathy requires a kind of projective imitation of the other. It is because of such common sense notions of empathy that Deleuze and Parnet develop their concept of sympathy as becoming. Their concept has nothing to do with imitation; they recognize that one cannot ever get inside the other, which would be tantamount to capturing the other and reducing them to the merely the same. Accordingly, Deleuze and Parnet write that “[s]ympathy is not a vague feeling of respect or of spiritual participation: on the contrary, it is the exertion or penetration of bodies….there is no judgment in sympathy but agreements of convenience between bodies of all kinds” (52). Later they write “This is sympathy, assembling” (53). Assembling, then, as an act of sympathy and symbiosis is what defines becoming as an aspect of the art of encounters mentioned in the discussion of ethology. The work of becoming is the work of sympathetic assemblage; it is all about setting free what lives in order to rethink and live in experience differently. In his commentary on the concept of becoming, Paul Patton clarifies the endeavor: “it is a question of the production of affects, or forming an inter-individual body with the real or imagined powers…of the other body in question” (Political 79). As such, becoming is linked very clearly to Deleuze’s idea of learning. This model of learning is delineated in Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition where he writes: For learning evolves entirely in the comprehension of problems as such, in the apprehension and condensation of singularities and in the composition of ideal events and bodies. Learning to swim or learning a foreign language means composing the singular points of one’s own body or one’s own language with those of another shape or element which tears us apart but also propels us into a hitherto unknown and unheard-of world of problems. To what are we dedicated if not to those problems which demand the very transformation of our body and our language? In short, representation and knowledge are modeled entirely upon propositions of consciousness which designate cases of solution, but those propositions by themselves give a completely inaccurate notion of the instance which engenders them as cases, and which they resolve or conclude. By contrast…learning express[es] that extra-propositional or subrepresentative problematic instance: the presentation of the unconscious, not the representation of consciousness. (192) For Deleuze, learning is precisely the experimental process of assemblage or forming ethological maps. By “propositions of consciousness,” Deleuze is referring to what he and Guattari will later call “doxa”:
106 Doxa is a type of proposition that arises in the following way: in a given perceptive- affective lived situation (for example, some cheese is brought to the dinner table), someone extracts a pure quality from it (for example, a foul smell); but at the same time as he [sic] abstracts the quality, he identifies himself with a generic subject experiencing a common affection (the society of those who detest cheese—competing as such with those who love it, usually on the basis of another idea). Discussion, therefore, bears on the choice of the abstract perceptual quality and the power of the generic subject affected. (What 145). This understanding of learning in relationship to the production of propositions of consciousness as doxa is a direct critique of discussion as a model for learning (as well as discussion as a model for thinking or philosophy). For Deleuze and Guattari, opinion is thoroughly abstract in thought, and as such never explains the “concrete richness of the sensible” because it “extracts an abstract quality from perception and a general power from affection” based on principles of recognition. Recognition is the primary form the dominant image of thought takes, and it is the product of a limitative experiment which Gatens suggests “captures bodies in stable forms” (“Feminism” 71). As a form of recognition, opinion has three capacities: “recognition of a quality in perception (contemplation), recognition of a group in affection (reflection), and recognition of a rival in the possibility of other groups and other qualities (communication)” (What 145-6). My point in bringing together these two texts, one about learning and one about opinion, is to show that learning does not happen on the level of recognition, of an experiment that ends in recognition whether as contemplation, reflection, or communication. All that happens in such cases is the restatement of an orthodoxy. Deleuze and Guattari write about such cases of recognition: It gives to the recognition of truth an extension and criteria that are naturally those of an ‘orthodoxy’: a true opinion will be one that coincides with that of the group to which one belongs by expressing it. This is clear to see in certain competitions: you express your opinion, but you ‘win’ (you have spoken the truth) if you say the same as the majority of those participating in the competition. The essence of opinion is will to majority and already speaks in the name of a majority. (What 146) For Deleuze and Guattari, becoming, as the experimental organization of encounters, challenges opinion in its three forms of contemplation, reflection, and communication as the model for learning. According to Claire Colebrook, in her fine book on Deleuze, opinion not only captures and reduces thought to manageable differences; opinion also generalizes and reduces affect: “Opinion or doxa makes a direct link between affect and concept, between what we see and what we say, or between the sensible and the intelligible” (24). Colebrook elaborates on this important point by creating a distinction between how people in every day life create their world and how art creates worlds: For the purposes of life everyday thinking has to work by a kind of shorthand. From a highly complex flow of perceptions I tend to perceive recognizable and repeatable objects. I do not perceive all the minute differences that make up the flow of time. I see this as an extended object that is the same. I regard myself not as a flow of perceptions, but as a person with an identity. So when I experience data—such as color, sound or texture—I subordinate it to an everyday concept. Art works in the other direction. It disengages the ordered flow into its singularities….Art may well have meanings and messages but what makes it art is not its content but its affect, the sensible force or style through which it produces content….However much it is mixed with other functions, the
107 fact that we do produce styles and sensible affects in art discloses something about what our thinking can do—that minds are not just machines for communication or information but that we also desire and work with affect. (Deleuze 24-5) Becoming as experimental assemblage does not rest on imagined unities like themes, meanings, or messages; becomings begin with the affective, separated from its link to opinion through concepts delimited and reduced by reflection, contemplation and communication. These three modes of recognition all function as kinds of an ontological illusion which separate bodies from the force of life, separate bodies from their powers of what they can do. While necessary for our survival in everyday life, these modes do not help us at all when it comes to resisting the dominant forces of contemporary capital. These modes posit a transcendent principle, whether conceived of as reason, God, or the subject, that strictly limits a body’s capacities. Becoming extracts the singular sense from a particular assemblage of bodies—and remember anything can be a body—and instead of reducing it to the already known, to the already given, it reassembles another body in relation to the affect in such a way that both are changed. But such transformation takes the form of cautious sympathy as Deleuze and Parnet explain: “sympathy is something to be reckoned with, it is a bodily struggle, hating what threatens and infects life, loving where it proliferates” (53). Deleuze, as a philosopher, is always after expanding and enhancing life, and becoming as a purely creative experimental assemblage of affective relations is one of the means to do that.
108 Chapter Eight: Becoming and Writing: Some Examples On Experimental Writing In this chapter, I am going to explore two endeavors to enact experimental becomings in two separate domains: a first-year paper bound writing class, and an advanced literature course in the Later Romantics taught partly with the goal of producing hypertext. Both courses asked the final student project to include an experimental aspect. In the first year writing class one paper succeeded, in the advanced class on the Later Romantics none of the hypertexts succeeded, in the instructor’s understanding, of being experimental. The question to answer in this chapter is why do some assignments succeed and other assignments fail when instructors request experimentation from their students? How can we promote experimental becomings, as a kind of affective labor, in such a way that such assignments become less of a hit or miss operation? If there is not a method, then are there at least some kinds of protocols we could follow in getting our students to think differently, beyond the subject/object divide, in terms of becoming? I will start first with the course on the Later Romantics, but before I do that the question of the significance of “experimentation” itself must be posed and responded to. There has been a long history of calls for, and pedagogies developed around, experimental writing models and strategies in composition studies: from calls for a return to creative non-fiction as a suitable subject matter for composition to engagements with grammatology, from versions of the Helene Cixous inspired ecriture feminine, to most recently engagements with hypertextual and hypermedia projects. From Winston Weathers’ advocacy of “grammar b” to Lillian Bridwell Bowles’ advocacy of multivocal texts, through Julia M. Allen and Lester Faigley’s alternative rhetorics for social change to Patricia Bizzell’s advocacy for and recent withdrawal of the concept of hybrid texts, a thorough sub discipline of the experimental has been part of composition studies. Patricia Bizzell justifies the necessity of such alternative forms of discourse: The academy collectively has finally grasped the point of the old fable about the blind men and the elephant. One gets a hold of the elephant’s ears and says. “The elephant, I find is very much like a fan!” Another gets the hold of the trunk and says, “No, the elephant is very like a snake!” A third grabs the leg and says, “No! Very like a tree!” And so on. If we want to see the whole beast, we should be welcoming, not resisting, the advent of diverse forms of academic discourse, and encouraging our students to bring all their discursive resources to bear on the intellectual challenges of the academic disciplines. (9) Bizzell’s turn to the fable of the blind elephant “seers” I find problematic because nobody who advocates either academic discourse or experimental discourse or juxtapositions of the two does so thoughtlessly and without a desire to extend their own version of reality. The debate between Chris Anderson and Kurt Spellmeyer mentioned in Part One attests to this, as does the debate between Lynn Worsham and T. R Johnson in Part Two. Often the concerns about experimental writing in opposition to academic writing hinge on problems that work through the old divisions between cognitive, expressive, and social-epistemic approaches to writing; that is to say, they are wrapped up in issues of identity. Bizzell locates the necessity of alternative discourse in the diversification of the academy—as more minority groups enter into the academy they bring their alternative discourses with them—hence she advocates a blending of these differing discourses. Allen and Faigley, in their article “Discursive Strategies for Social Change: An Alternative Rhetoric of Argument” define “social change” as “a shifting in power arrangements to benefit
109 those previously lacking in either formal or informal prerogatives of influence….If people want to change their life conditions, they must challenge certain seemingly necessary connections in social and discursive relations and construct others” (143). Implicit within such calls for “alternative” rhetorics is the implicit agency of the subject, but also a clear separation between life and the arrangements (what Allen and Faigley call “life conditions”) that organize life like discursive conventions. Even within the call for the alternative, the Kantian dualism that undergirds the social-epistemic comes into play. Relations, the subject matter of composition in general, are secondary to the identity and hence subjective agency of the writer. There are many in composition studies who are resistant to such calls for “alternative discourses.” For example Bruce Horner in Terms for Work reduces all such alternatives to a kind of experimentation with conventions. Horner explains his reticence: Composition’s history of fetishizing specific textual forms, illustrated by its fascination both with ‘error’ and experimental textual forms, gives ample evidence of the neglect of its relations of production, as does its almost complete neglect until recently of the technological and human physiological demands of writing….textual forms are imagined in themselves to produce specific effects, good or bad, rather than being seen as notations which depend for their production and effect on specific practices with them. (219-20) While Horner is clear that he doesn’t want to dismiss totally alternative modes of discourse, he wants to make sure that these alternative modes are “investigated as socially, historically mediated” (223). While this is something Allen and Faigley would agree with, Horner still makes relations secondary to other conditions, in this case social and historical mediation. In his study of alternative modes of rhetoric, Resisting Writings (and the Boundaries of Composition), Derek Owens answers Horner’s complaint, but also ends up reinscribing Worsham’s pedagogical imperative at the same time. He writes that “[s]tylistic innovations are never just aesthetic flavors; alternative preferences are nothing less than alternative social constructs. Our discourse is more than an extension of our personalities and our environments; our discourse is our personality, is our environment” (230). Clearly he is trying to advocate the subject as immanent within discourse. But the organizing action behind such an announcement requires the necessity of recognizing the “relativism of discourse” as a “constructive relativism, one tolerant of shifts, conflicting traditions, and opposing imaginations” (231). However in the very next paragraph he turns to a lecture by James Baldwin in which Baldwin states: “the purpose of education, finally, is to create in a person the ability to look at the world for himself, to make his own decisions….To ask questions of the universe, and then learn to live with those questions, is the way he achieves his own identity. But no society is really anxious to have that kind of person around” (quoted in Owens 231). Owens’ gloss on the subject is to see it as a challenge for contemporary teachers; the challenge is constructed as: How imaginatively we search for ways of spending time with our students that help us all rebel against the state’s highly successful program of defining education as a process of rigid mechanization and self-effacement; how imaginatively we withstand the insidious, institutional drive to erase any and all creative ruptures as we advocate pedagogies of imaginative, constructive resistance. (231) Here in the juxtaposition between Baldwin’s claim and Owens’ response, although not explicitly developed by Owens, is the paramount force of all calls for alternative rhetorics: the production of the creative individual as the correlate of the production of alternative creative discourse. Again we move away from the subject matter of composition, the production of relations themselves, to the production of a particular type of identity, an identity capable of choosing
110 creatively between alternatives. There is a desire to return to a neo-liberal version of the subject in these calls for experimentation, a refusal of the creative mind to relinquish its hold on the docile and malleable body, whether the creative mind is constructed by discourse or not, repeating all of the old dualisms from the Cartesian and Kantian tradition. It strikes me that the notion of experiment conceives of itself as “personal” or “identity” experimentation with discourse as the motivating factor. But as we have seen, given the conditions of contemporary capitalism, the work of writing and learning has become the production of relations, and the work of experimental writing has become the specific resistance of doxa as the grounding of a subject. To make this move it is necessary to return to literalizing the metaphor of the body in writing and to seek out the multiple assemblages that a body can enter into and become with. It is to challenge the ontological illusions of body as bounded space and time as linear progression. As Deleuze puts it in his description of learning: “To what are we dedicated if not to those problems which demand the very transformation of our body and our language” (Difference 192). The problem composition faces is the problem of the traditional rhetorical situation. For example, in their work on alternative rhetorics, Allen and Faigley locate this as the primary problem for the production of alternative forms of discourse: we need a richer theory of the rhetorical situation than the familiar rhetorical triangle. Discussions of context based on the rhetorical triangle tend to render the speaker/writer, subject, and audience as independent entities. Context then becomes either the background or is then described in terms of the immediate situation. Understanding how discursive strategies can lead to social change demands not only extending a notion of context to the history of writers, subject matters and audiences but also comprehending how each is located in multiple relations of power and how discourses are related to practices. If people want to change their life conditions, they must challenge certain seemingly necessary connections in social and discursive relations. (143) Allen and Faigley clearly see their model as an initial foray into the uses of alternative rhetoric and make a call for more theorizations of alternative models. I want to argue for becoming as a practice that extends their initial call. Becoming and its connected concepts—assemblages, affect, territorialization, deterritorialization, reterritorialization, and so forth—create a differing model of the rhetorical situation in which none of the terms of the rhetorical triangle can ever be fixed. My argument is that such a reconceptualization works on the level of micropolitics of bodies—where bodies are entities of all kinds—and focuses on the affective production of differences. This is a rhetorical situation that doesn’t presuppose an audience, nor does it specifically create an audience; it calls for an audience out of the future as the enactment of future becomings. There is no purpose or goal other than following a line of flight and creating another assemblage. It is in this sense that we consider the role of composition as fomenting the long revolution or a model of consistent struggle against the powers of doxa and the majoritarian impulse. The difference between Deleuze’s conception of experimentation and composition’s is that the accounts of composition always define experimentation as aberrant. For Deleuze, experimentation is the only game in town—one is always experimenting with relations as they live through their lives. It is clearly one of our capacities as bodies gathered in assemblages in relation to other assemblages. The important question is not whether to experiment or not; the question is how do we experiment? There is not a choice for students to either experiment or not as Horner would say “with conventions.” This is where Deleuze’s ethological approach becomes intensely important: the questions surrounding experimentation are which ones lead to points of
111 capture, which ones reduce our capacity to act, which ones increase our capacity to act. Horner, for the most part is right: the form itself and challenging the form of discourse through alternative models does not in itself do anything. It is the relations that are made or remade in the process that are most important and significant. One can experiment to produce the molar in the same way one can experiment to produce the molecular. While there is no immediate form to follow, Deleuze does provide a kind of protocol for experiments in the form of sympathetic assemblages as formed in the process of becoming. To explore this in relationship to the work of students, and the kinds of work students can do, I turn now to an example of experiments resulting in capture. Hypertext and the Event of Capture In the summer of 2003, I and another colleague were asked to intervene into a pedagogical project devised by a professor for a course on the Later Romantics at a public, selective liberal arts institution of approximately 17,000 students. During that course the professor took her students on a journey begun in 1828 with the Bijou—a gift book of selections of poetry, prose, dramatic sketches, and paintings by well known and lesser known artists of the time—and ending in the present, but with an eye toward the future. The professor's goal was to deeply engage students in the process of reading, understanding, and producing text. Engagement is a particular problem in this university’s educational environment since the mostly middle to upper-class students expect a kind of edutainment, with their primary demand as the right to not be bored. To respond to this problem, the professor turned to the technology of hypertext. She created an optional assignment for students (see Appendix A) that requested students take one of the texts from the Bijou and do traditional contextual research of the author and era along with close readings of their selected texts and combine them with an experimental section in order to produce a hypertext that would then by uploaded to the Internet. For our purposes, here, I am most interested in the students’ endeavors to create an experimental portion of the hypertext. As defined in the assignment sheet, the experimental directions read as follows: Write 1 to 3 very experimental paragraphs connecting the poem to our time in some way—to current events, contemporary art works, art, music, your philosophy of life. These paragraphs can be speculative. If you can find either the works you mention or essays about the events online, or any other online images, music, or text that expresses what you are trying to say about our contemporary perspective and its relation this early 19th-century work, list the related URL’s—ultimately, these will be live links. (Appendix A) In this assignment, the experimental paragraphs were to be written out beforehand and then produced as web documents using Macromedia’s Dreamweaver 4. As added incentives, and what made this assignment optional, students were allowed to substitute their hypertext for their final exam and know that their work would be, as the assignment sheet stated, “linked to the poem in The Bijou—permanently!! –this is your first publication, which you can indeed list on your Resume” (Appendix A). While pleased with the overall results of the hypertexts created by the students, the professor was not as pleased with the students’ experimental endeavors. My colleague and I were to look at the results and figure out how we could help students better develop protocols22 for attending to experimental processes. Before I continue with the
22 I use the term “protocol” to separate it from any idea of method grandly conceived. Experimentation must be immanently strategic and tactical, derived from the milieu of bodily encounters, and not preconceived nor methodically applied. 112 diagnostic of the students’ experimentation, it is necessary to explore the notion of hypertext as a mode of contemporary writing practice. According to most hypertext scholars, hypertext was given its name by Theodore Nelson in 1986. Nelson defined it as “nonsequential writing—text that branches and allows choices to the reader, best read at an interactive screen” (quoted in Carter 3). When it emerged on the scene, like many emerging technologies, hypertext was granted a kind of formal liberatory status—which is to say that commentators argued that something inherent in hypertext itself made possible liberatory experiments. According to J. Johnson-Eilola and A. C. Kimme Hea, [t]he challenge hypertext poses is instantiated by several commonly defined aspects of hypertext: nodes and links; nonlinearity; multiplicity; and configurations of images, words, sounds, and other media. Nodes hold different configurations of media and are linked to other nodes also holding different configurations of media. This linking structure opens up new possibilities, allowing the emergence of non-linear, multiple- perspective hypertexts. (416) In a way, the rise of hypertext as a technology in literary studies parallels the rise of calls for the return of creative non-fiction in composition studies, as a means to create non-linear alternative rhetorics that explore multiple perspectives. It also resembles the rise of creative non-fiction, or literary non-fiction in that it allows for the reclamation of the traditional subject, rhetor, or even designer (Hesse). Johnson-Eilola and Kimme Hea imply that the demise of hypertext is partly involved with it being “submerged into a range of technologies, most profoundly perhaps, the [World Wide] Web” (417). In fact, many have argued that the declining liberatory potential of hypertext rests in its co-optation by the forces of capital at the hands of the World Wide Web. In such a case, the Web begins to represent a global supermarket with hypertext as the packaging that reveals our desire for consumption by producing kinds of affective relations. Even though more recent hypertext theorists have become less sanguine about the hopes for hypertext, they still hold on to the power of the form of itself to be, if not transgressive, then at least productive. However, I think it is more prudent to argue along with composition scholars like Horner that no product in itself is productive of anything but the kinds of relations that make possible its production. Recall, my only difference with Horner is that he constructs relations in a pre- existing dialectical structure of use and exchange value, whereas for me, relations come prior to the ontological constituents of any system in the form of affect. However, many contemporary hypertext scholars take the opposing position as their starting point for a discussion of hypertext. For example, Locke Carter in his reconfiguration of hypertext for the purposes of argumentation normalizes a definition of hypertext in terms of its inherent functions of the node and the link: The node is a chunk of something: text, graphic, or sound—the raw information that, when connected to other nodes, constitutes the meat of the hypertext. Nodes are joined by links, electronic connectors that can or cannot have an explicit meaning (depending on which theorist you read). Although all hypertext writers agree on these two terms, they do not agree on their definitions. Nodes can be as general as data or as specific as a paragraph. These can be graphic, audio, textual, or any combination of the three. Links are sometimes described as mere connectors; other times they are compared to knots in fabric, holding together concepts and making meaning out of their relationships. (4) Given the polysemy of its defining terms, one of the problematics of hypertext is how to constitute its capabilities in terms of ontological concerns. Carter turns to George Landow, one of the ground breakers in hypertext theory to work through this problem. Landow privileges the
113 linking mechanism as the core of hypertext, but at the same time makes links secondary to what is linked. Linkage is also constructed as a matter of choice between things (in this case nodes or chunks of meaning-matter): to make connections between texts and between texts and images, the electronic link encourages one to think in terms of connections. To state the obvious: one cannot make connections without having things to connect. Those linkable items must not only have some qualities that make the writer want to connect them, they must also exist in separation, divided. (quoted in Carter 5). Here we can see that there is a clear relationship of primacy granted to the “chunks” over the links. In addition, Landow, and by relation Carter, relies on qualities inherent within the chunks as providing the condition of linkage. The writer acts as the director of the relations but is always tied to whatever inherent quality the chunks represent, which is to say that the writer can not make a break between the perceived quality of the chunk and the chunk itself. The writer, then, envelops the chunk within their own subjective perspective or treats the chunk as having some kind of inviolable essence. A transformed version of this model can be seen again in the work of Sean D. Williams who defines a design model for the production of hypertext. The design model, according to Williams, works with the “process” model of composition focusing on “four primary skills of ‘planning,’ ‘transformation,’ ‘evaluation’ and ‘revision’” (126). Williams says that the design process model “distills” these four skills into “nine smaller stages” and “encourages their integration with technology” so teachers can help students see composition “in the sense of composing…as assemblage” (126, emphasis in original). The product of the students’ labor is a text that can most easily be “represented in hypertext” that changes the way students understand knowledge: [this model] models the accrual of knowledge, not Aristotelian logic, as pieces of information are linked to one another to reveal several possible relations among the items of information, but do not necessarily demonstrate logical constructions. The design model, then, encourages students to see composition as a process that occurs through making connections among disparate, yet related texts in contingent contexts where several possible conclusions can coexist. (126, emphasis in original) Williams succeeds in turning our attention away from the features of hypertext toward the process worked through by students in relation to hypertext, and thus we get a larger picture of student/technology interaction and the possibilities for hypertext. However, relations still remain subservient to the things related; links remain subservient to the nodes. While what shows up through such processes may be informative, visually appealing, and even provocative, it is constituted according to specific desired ends of the designer: This design process certainly complicates the process associated with composing verbal texts because the mingling of the verbal, visual, and the hypertextual causes slippages in meaning: Associations are not necessarily classifications or logical proofs, yet the designer must be able to train the slippages into a form of revealing their authorial purpose. The added complexity, then, produces a more thorough engagement with rhetorical, critical, and technological skills, and approximates the linked, multimedia structure of problem solving more effectively then verbal or visual compositions do. Students develop critical, rhetorical, and technological facility because they compose their arguments from the distillations of others' verbal and visual arguments, combining those arguments into a hypertext where each of the positions literally decomposes the
114 others in the same hypertext. (Williams 132) Hypertext here functions to create a representation of multiplicity, configured in multiple positions, and it may make students more rhetorically savvy, but it doesn’t offer a model of transformation of the relations that go into the production of the text itself. Relations are still secondary and subservient to the whims of the designer into a closed argument. While it is important that students conduct experiments on relations, it is imperative that we rethink the relations as the secondary cause of already existing items with inherent qualities. My point all along has been the reverse--the relations, or links, precede the material items related. The Landow/Carter model of linkage makes possible the reinforcement of already existing relations in terms of contiguity, similarity, and causality, relations that fix the identity of thought, no matter how you increase the numbers of possibilities. The Williams model makes the interaction between material chunks and material nodes more dynamic, but it substitutes the relations of opposition. In both cases, the designer/writer acts as the transcendent impetus for production which always reduces the experience of difference to either sameness or opposition. If the endeavor of learning is to think differently, then we must find a way to conceive the relations that guide our thinking in terms of difference itself and not the merely different or the almost the same. The endeavor, instead of locating the conditions of possibility for assembling relations and bodies, is to locate the real conditions of assemblage, how these relations get over coded by traditional accounts of experience, emotion, and labor, and to immanently construct a different assemblage productive of life itself. This is the endeavor to create a critical research project through attention to genealogy, ethology, the affective labor of becoming. Let us return to the endeavors by the professor's students to see how the problem of relations foregrounds their non-experimental experiments. It is clear that the professor’s assignment is hoping for the experimental text produced to be non-linear and evocative of multiple perspectives. However, different than dynamic hypertexts, the websites actually built by her students and their work with The Bijou operate more like photographs. If we take the example of Jon Sonnheim (Appendix B) the relation between Coleridge’s poem and the modern day is based entirely on similarity as a function of memory: “The pervading theme of this poem, with the narrator caught up and stuck within his own personal, dark, cold, melancholy hell of winter, contrasted against the new rebirth of beauty, nature, and spring in the world surrounding him, reminded me of the film Groundhog Day, starring Bill Murray as it utilizes the same general ideas and premises” (Appendix B). The only image in the experimental node is an image of the cover of the video for the movie, which does not link to anything else. Sonnheim has created a clear one-dimensional link between the two texts based on identification of sameness. Because he engages the text on the level of sameness, Sonnheim is forced to relate the two texts together in terms of generalized categories that are so encompassing that the sameness of the texts can be proven. He is stuck with a transcendent overview of his design without addressing the micro-structures of relations that might point to alternative perspectives. In his hypertext presentation there is no multiplicity; there is only an over-arching sameness put into, no doubt based on the plot of the movie, a circular return of the same. Sonnheim writes: Connors, much like the speaker of the poem, has become jaded by life, unhappy, and hopeless, stuck in the depressing past and unable to change or move on. Connors is luckily given the chance to move on, grow, and progress, getting to live the same day over and over until he gets it right. He slowly transforms into a model citizen, saving lives, taking up countless hobbies he enjoys, and most importantly falling in love with the
115 woman of his dreams. Although it takes many mistakes and failures along the way to reach this point, Connors gradually is able to become the man he wants to be, enabling the next day, tomorrow, to dawn and finally come, thus beginning the first days of spring as well as the rest of his life. (Appendix B) There are many ways to proceed through an analysis of this node. First, I would like to begin with what might make this experimental as it relates to the production of hypertext. What makes it partly experimental is that Sonnheim recognizes a difference between the two texts that he tries to exploit through juxtaposition. By juxtaposing the two texts, Sonnheim is able to provide a different reading of both the film and the poem by reading the film as the completion of the problem announced in Coleridge’s sonnet: “WORK WITHOUT HOPE draws nectar in a sieve/And HOPE without an OBJECT cannot live” (Appendix B). Juxtaposition in itself is not experimental, but in this case it resembles Allen and Faigley’s announcement of Kenneth Burke’s “perspective by incongruity” as a strategy for alternative rhetorics of social change. As they define it, perspective by incongruity is “setting one assumed truth in an incongruous situation to undermine its truthfulness” (Allen and Faigley 162). Sonnheim is setting the truth of the poem as announced by the rhyming couplet within the truth context of the truth of the film. For the speaker of the sonnet, whom Sonnheim quickly identifies with Coleridge himself, everything is hopeless because of the features of Coleridge’s life. By shifting the hopelessness into the context of Groundhog Day, Sonnheim is able to add hope to the picture and, in a certain way, redeem the myth of individual progress. But this perhaps, is also, where the experiment fails. The point of perspective by incongruity is to “shatter pieties” by which Burke means “the sense of what properly goes with what” and the “yearning to conform with the ‘sources of one’s being” (quoted in Allen and Faigley 162). For Burke “juxtaposing one ideological correctness together with another, of a different ideological stripe, the two call each other into question….it is more likely that the less powerful one will act upon the other to reduce its power” (Allen and Faigley 162). Coleridge’s perspective is never created by Sonnheim as a valid perspective: “I believe that the hopelessness expressed in this poem directly relates what he [Coleridge] was feeling in his own life, as he was essentially in a drug treatment/apothecary center at the home of James Gillman at this time, having already lost several children to premature death and undergoing separation from his wife” (Appendix B). What is interesting here is that Sonnheim shifts the hopelessness from Coleridge’s account of nature at work, to Coleridge’s personal and familial problems. Groundhog Day operates a different ideology, the bootstrap ideology of contemporary American society: if you have a problem, then get up and change it. Sonnheim implies that this is exactly what Connors does as he “slowly transforms into a model citizen,” as if it were a voluntary act on his part. Sonnheim conveniently elides his own recognition that Connors is “luckily given the chance” “to live the same day over and over until he gets it right” (Appendix B), which is the accumulation of respect (through saving others), leisure time (through taking up countless hobbies), and a woman. Here what is important is that Sonnheim translates relations into objects to be acquired— and objects to be acquired seemingly without much work on Connors’ part. This is important because Sonnheim does not recognize the necessity of Connors having to recognize the differences between one day to the next in his endeavor to “get it to right.” The problem with the experiment is that the cycle of life leading up to “what is right” is already predetermined by the texts being linked and not by the process of linkage. We have Connors past self as one aspect, in this case represented by Coleridge’s text, and the Connors of “what is right” that he only has to
116 link up with, as if it were already part of himself. The genesis of experimentation, then, cannot begin with objects, texts, chunks, or meanings to be linked. It must begin with other relations that are not attached to a pre-given end. Sonnheim’s experiment then is captured through a commitment to a kind of bootstrapping ideology that re-confirms the power of the subject as bounded, rational agent progressing temporally towards an arbitrary model of what it means to “have it all.” In Melina Vissat’s experiment, a different experimentation resulting in capture is produced. Much like Sonnheim’s hypertext project, Vissat’s takes the five part structure the assignment outlines and the experimental part, or part five, reads as if it were a conclusion based on the previous four nodes. Again, Vissat also takes Coleridge’s “Work Without Hope” sonnet as her object for analysis. She establishes the connection between Coleridge’s sonnet and contemporary life in terms of two timeless themes: “themes of nature reflecting the human spirit” (Appendix C para. 1) and “the role purpose and responsibility play in our society today” (Appendix C para. 3). The imagery she uses seems to be performing the function of establishing coherence, as two images are repeated across all five nodes: on the right edge of each node is a an engraving of a tree rising vertically, and on the left hand side is a cherub carrying a wreath, which also appears as the frontispiece to The Bijou. Vissat uses this image of the cherub twice to frame the links within the document as a whole. The cherub above is facing toward but looking away from the center of the page and the written text; the one below is facing away from but looking back at the text. Above the text itself, centered, is an image of a painting by Georgia O’Keefe. The text itself is broken into four paragraphs. In general, Vissat uses Coleridge’s sonnet to connect the themes of the sonnet to an existing problematic in our contemporary society. The difference between Sonnheim and Vissat is the difference between articulating a solution to a problem and the recontextualization of a problem. For Sonnheim, Groundhog Day acts as a textual response to Coleridge’s problem, but in the case of the movie, the main character is able to get past the despair of his current circumstances to relive his life toward its proper end. For Vissat, Coleridge’s problem is our problem only intensified because of the increasing speed of the world as a result of global capital. Vissat writes: “[t]hrough rampant globalization and constant eco-awareness, nature has become the perfect foil to reflect how far humans come away from our once-familiar natural beginnings” (Appendix C para. 1). Vissat creates an image of nature as a way to slow down the “hustle and bustle” of modern life, and we “use it as a reflection and a reminder of ourselves, but we also take the opportunity to examine it closer in order to find what we like to ordain as beauty and truth” (Appendix C para. 1). Nature functions as a stop gap, a plug in the flow of the technological enhanced hyper-capitalism that turns human beings into just another flow of global capital. As a primary example, Vissat turns to the paintings of Georgia O’Keeffe, whose “close up portraits of the intimate inner workings of flowers and plants bring us back to the natural world of purpose and use” to which Vissat subordinates the claim that “there are no extraneous affairs in nature” (Appendix C para. 2). Vissat cites a number of examples of “vogue” “fads” such as Buddhism, Tai Chi, and raw foodism as ways that “nature proved to be a true foil for our human ways, but it also provides us with another medium with which to reconnect with ourselves” (Appendix C para. 2). Here we are beginning to see what Vissat’s method of experimentation is: she is developing the concept of nature and the human as a classic double bind; in all cases nature is that which humans want to move away from, but it also provides an impetus by which humans understand themselves—in a kind of human-nature hybrid. What is
117 interesting in Vissat’s comparison is that nature becomes the site, or the location, where purpose and responsibility lie. Vissat writes: Coleridge’s “Work Without Hope” primarily focuses on the role purpose and responsibility play in our society, even today. As the speaker points out in the poem, he has ‘lips unbrightened’ and a ‘wreathless brow;’ he is without purpose as he strolls along through a world of busy work. This raises many questions about our own human need to claim success in order to ward off feelings of despair. Are we machines? Is our only purpose to work? To create? What defines purpose or utility? What is interesting here is the understanding of work as being guaranteed only by success and the reading of the “lips” and the “wreath” in Coleridge’s poem as signs of success in terms of reward. All the while next to the writing is the cherub with its wreath waiting to bestow its reward on the worthy. Vissat is creating interesting combinations, interesting mixtures, which could become experimental. But the idea of work as necessarily productive of value captures her experiment and turns it back into a generalized problematic of hopelessness. Vissat sees a clear relation between the internal essence of the human, as human nature, and the purpose of work as productivity. In short, hers is one way that human culture re-writes human nature. What predominates in this reading is the dualism between nature and culture even in spite of the recognition that “there are no extraneous affairs in nature.” This is a claim about the recognition of the immanence of life, how the micro-relations in nature are inseparable from the macro-relations of culture. As a result, the features of Coleridge’s poem that represent inspiration as a transcendent guarantor of purpose are translated onto capitalism as the transcendent guarantor of purpose and usefulness. Vissat finds herself caught in her own double bind. As such, her experiment ends up with a diagnosis of the problem, but doesn’t propose a mode of thinking as a way to work with and through the problem. This occurs because the relation that holds between the sonnet and her experiment is totally subsumed by the affect of hopelessness. Whereas Sonnheim was able to escape hopelessness through the construction of an “ideal man,” Vissat finds the hopelessness of Coleridge too much to overcome given the current conditions of society. Vissat writes: Coleridge may have believed himself to be worthless—the speaker of “Work Without Hope” is almost definitely without hope. In today’s time these are questions that society is still trying to answer. With the influx of today’s rampant consumerism and marketing, people are being reduced to machines simply through their availability to purchase; the masses have become targets on which business and advertisers focus. So then is the purpose of the general American simply to buy and contribute to an active economy? Perhaps Coleridge would be interested in the idea that if an individual did not participate in capitalism, he or she would be without purpose in today’s time. It’s a theme of thought started by the romantics, and set into context today, can be limitless in its thought provoking possibilities. (Appendix C) Vissat’s hypertext engages a rich problematic, but as an experiment it is captured and constrained by one dominant impulse, the majoritarian impulse of opinion that generalizes about the nature of bodies before hand. At the heart of this impulse is the rejection of immanence and the active becoming of life in favor of a transcendent power too great to over-come. As such, Vissat limits herself to contemplation, reflection, and communication—the three sites of recognition. Recognition as a model of thought always presupposes that it knows what a body can do beforehand. As such relations are fixed, and as a result, the links in the hypertext are fixed; they do not allow for the possibility of a line of flight, for a different way of being and
118 knowing in relating to the text. I would argue that the chief role of experimentation as becoming, that which makes it useful as a model of resistance, is that one does not know where they will end up; they do not what will change between bodies. This is not a failing on the part of the part of the students, and they are in error only to the extent that we recognize error as the over coding of the excess of relations that is produced by encounters between bodies. Both Sonnheim and Vissat find it necessary to reduce the excesses of these relations to conformable expectations, instead of allowing the excess, the waste, to proliferate and be productive of difference in itself. As Johnson-Eilola and Kimme Hea argue, the problem of experiments in hypertext, or hypertext as experimental, is challenged by its subsumption into the larger hypertextual body of the web which endeavors to turn all experiments into controlled sites of the economic exchange of affect. To demonstrate this point I want to turn to the Dreamweaver 4 tutorial that helps people engage with hypertext. In their overview of the process, Dreamweaver provides users with a screen that demonstrates the five part process of creating a Web page: planning, design, development, publishing and maintenance. The image on the screen represents the process as a series of interconnecting stages: each part of the process is placed within a circle, with curved arrows leading from one circle to the next, so that the entire whole itself represents a circle. From the beginning, in this image there is a clear aim of coherence, of having all the parts, and the processes that produce those subordinate to the interests of the whole—which is the intended goal of the overall Web page. The process of Web page construction is represented metaphorically as a cycle of necessity.23 But what is most important for our understanding of Dreamweaver’s design model is the position from which a designer is supposed to start. Under “planning” Dreamweaver writers argue: The first step in creating a Web page is planning. Use the planning phase to gather information to define the site's goals, profile the intended audience, and determine technical requirements (such as browser or plug-in issues), access requirements, and site organization. In this model what becomes clear is that Dreamweaver realizes Web page design as a container for information or as a series of frames for display of information. Content on this model is always primary to linkage, or the relations the Web page is going to build. This is further reinforced by Dreamweaver’s use of “tables” as bounded blocks that are to be manipulated in the design phase of the Web Site. In Dreamweaver, one builds these tables first, and then one adds into these containers either information or interactivity. Linkage is always subordinate to the goals of the Web page. Another condition of this tabular structure is the representation of the virtual structure of the page in terms resembling tree structures or genealogical charts. In short, Dreamweaver conceptualizes communication in terms of the conduit metaphor discussed in Chapter 1. It is arguable that implicit in the framework of Dreamweaver are conditions contrary to experimental becomings. At the origins of this is the idea that the goal of the Web page is of paramount interest, with all content and linkage being subordinated to that goal. In a fascinating discussion of the characteristics of linkage, “Hypertext Structure as the Event of Connection,” Adrian Miles argues that we need to understand hypertext linkage outside of a model which reduces what she calls “the anxiety of linkage.” This anxiety is twofold, in relation to links themselves, the anxiety is productive of pleasure for readers because links are always pragmatic, open, and excessive and only retrospectively closed through the “teleological
23 See for example the early model of Britton and Lindemann’s representation of models of the composing process. 119 imposition of coherence” (61). Secondly, the response to such “anxiety of linkage” is further curtailed by hypertext theorists’ endeavors that “domesticate the link as some category or species of rhetorical figure, always and already at the service of some other role, for instance to facilitate navigation, allow cognitive and associative mapping of ideas, or the incorporation of otherwise disparate arguments, documents, or objects, within a larger docuverse” (61). Miles’ overall point is that relations, in this case hypertext links, are always productive of an excess, an excess which always gets over coded because of the transformation of purpose into closure or intention, and pattern as the means for that transformation. Miles wants to rethink the link in terms outside of such connections, and wants to understand the link in terms of its capacity as a performative event. She turns to Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the “incorporeal transformation” to make this point. She argues that we see links as “an imperative that affects what the node means in quite fundamental ways, yet leaves the node itself untouched, or unmarked” (62). A link then is to be construed always as more than a mere “navigational cue or aid.” In Deleuze’s terms, the link is always an external relation which changes the relations between terms while leaving the terms themselves intact. For Miles, the excess of the link makes it possible for linkage to resist models of capitalist exchange. She turns to Georges Bataille’s discussion of a general and restricted economy whereby in a general economy there is an expenditure without any return, and in restricted economy all expenditure is governed by the necessity of a return. Miles reads links as a function of a general economy, which implies that “links always have a remainder, a residue of contextualizing force that extends against and into the moment of their promise, and at the point of their enaction into an open future that can only be a bet against an unknowable outcome. Which is to say after the link has arrived, it then recontextualizes what was, and before the link has arrived we are always subject to the risk of the radically open” (62). A link, then, in Miles definition is the very definition of affect as the means to becoming. In order to explain how it is that the performative excess of links gets over coded, Miles turns to a discussion of narrative schemas, which defines narrative as “a series of transformations understood by a relation of cause and effect where two deep cognitive functions are utilized, an awareness of purpose, and an awareness of pattern” (63). Purpose assumes that “a narrative intends that the connection between parts (for example nodes and their links) is posited as meaningful, and so assumed to understandable in appropriate contexts” (63). Pattern refers to “the active process of identifying meaningful sets of relations, which requires to the ongoing testing and amendment of assumptions and expectations of relevance and causal priority” (63). For Miles, one of the features of such narrative schemas is a reliance on closure that “generates teleological principles that impact on excess and meaning” (63). These teleological principles are generated by one simple fact of the experience of narrative: “a sequence [of events] of any order can only be recognized as a cohesive sequence once it is completed….Furthermore, while sequence can only be constituted as a sequence retrospectively, once constituted teleological constraint overdetermines causal connection at the expense of other narrative and formal attributes” (63-4). For Miles, the concern is that hypertext design and creation follows from the impact of these recognitions of how readers read. Which is to say that hypertext writers put the goal and the nodes before the links. Miles argues that “to the extent that we write with an instrumental ending in mind our links and hypertexts will remain domesticated and quiet machines, and in the manner in which we are writing in this way we will misunderstand links as merely aids on the way to clarity” (67). In terms of what to do in the future, to open up our access to the dynamic power of linkage, Miles responds by pointing to experiments in montage
120 and collage that might provide answers because “it is the tension between the always open link and the retrospective erasure of this excess in teleological determination that is the site of hypertext” (67). Such an understanding of linkage might take the form of “multilinear recombination” instead of “branching events, or indeterminate narrative that currently dominates hypertext” (66). In terms of experimental becoming, the excess of linkage is affect that is productive of becoming. Multilinear recombination can be understood as becoming. But as we can see, and the most important point, as argued before, is that there is nothing inherent within hypertext as a mode of writing that enhances its status as experimental. Its capacity is defined by what it can do, by its capacity to affect and be affected, by its capacity to enter into assemblages, and transform assemblages it enters into. As Johnson-Eilola and Kimme Hea put it, “hypertext was merely a metaphor, a set of suggestions for thinking about communication, for living in the world, of the necessity for (and unavoidability of) making and living with the consequences of connections of disparate forces” (422-3). This is the important cautionary tale begun by Spinoza: nobody can know beforehand what a body is capable of; one must experiment with it to identify its capacities, to sympathetically, symbiotically become along with those capacities, in hopes for a different way of thinking and being in the world. But we can also begin to see the protocol for developing the concept of experimental becoming: by not subordinating the link to the node, the relation to the information; by not deriving difference from similarities, by not directly linking affect to concept; by literalizing the metaphor of texts as having bodies; by being cautiously sympathetic, deterritorializing to reterritorialize somewhere else. Experimental Becomings in a First Year Composition Class In Chapter 1 I detailed many of the failures I have had as a teacher of composition. In this section, I want to report on one of my successes as an example of how a process of experimental becoming might work in the first year composition classroom. In the Fall of 1997 I was assigned to teach a section of English Composition in a Living/Learning dorm, the theme of which was leadership. A fellow graduate student who wanted to share the experience of teaching in a dorm class, and who wanted the experience of team teaching, offered to teach the course with me, and I graciously accepted her offer. In these dorm communities, the students are required to take a series of classes developed by the University’s Educational Leadership program, and were implored to take one of the composition sections offered in their dorm. Ideally there was supposed to be interaction between the instructors of the Leadership course, and the instructors of the composition courses, but given time constraints, and the long summer in between, such collaboration never came to fruition. My teaching partner and I designed a course offering examples of “Intellectuals as Alternative Leaders” for the students to follow. The course included a variety of texts: written texts by Roland Barthes, Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, Gerald Vizenor, and many others; musical texts by singer Bob Marley and the group Gang of Four; poetry by Etheridge Knight, Wendy Rose, June Jordan and others; the movie Matewan directed by John Sayles; and a series of video recorded speeches by Father Charles E. Coughlin, John L. Lewis, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr., Barbara Jordan, and Jesse Jackson. Our endeavor was to demonstrate how leadership could be productive of both intellectual satisfaction and social change. To begin the semester we started with the idea of the necessity of scholarship as a condition of both intellectual development and a precondition for social change, which is to say one must know something about something before they can go about changing it. The course was designed along the lines of a social-epistemic approach as a result of the demands of the course as laid down by the strictures of the writing program at the
121 university during that time. The work for the course included, besides the reading, listening, and viewing of the above texts, twenty lines a week on our class Listserv based on any subject discussed the previous week, four short two-page response papers abstracting from and synthesizing the discussion on the listserv into coherent arguments, a four page annotated bibliography supporting a topic about leadership they wanted to explore, an argumentative research paper culled from their annotative bibliography, and a narrative that they would write across the whole semester. On the first day of class we gave them a fairly open-ended assignment, asking them to write the history of themselves as scholars. At midterm we returned to the paper asking them to choose a significant aspect of the paper to rethink, develop and revise given certain things we learned over the semester, and for the final portfolio we asked them to revise this paper once again as either an experimental or reflective piece, taking into account the subject matter of the course. We conceived the narrative project in terms of an opportunity for students to experiment with the subject matter of the course and as a way to combine alternative modes of discourse with alternative modes of leadership; which is to say, we were hoping the narratives would become performative of certain kinds of enactment of, if not social change, then understandings of social change. At the same time, we were hoping to change our students’ understanding of revision from simple editing to a complete intervention into their understanding of their ideas. At the time, I was just beginning my studies into the work of Deleuze, and Deleuze and Guattari and had already been captured by Deleuze’s ideas about relations. It was during this course that I realized the power of conceptual metaphor as both constraint and enabling device in my teaching and in students’ work. The first assignment for the narrative project was for the students to write a three to four page paper outlining their history as scholars. We gave no preliminary definition of the term “scholar” to the students and explained to them that their definitions should become clear as they defined their activities as scholars. On the listserv many of the students complained that the topic was too open ended, and tried to get us to reduce the complexity of the assignment. In the end, we received a variety of personal narratives, the majority of which made a clear distinction between being scholars in school, and being scholars of life. This distinction between life and school is a dominant mode of student understanding which I’ve seen repeated in many accounts of reading and writing. The implication of such distinctions is in part inspired by a perceived distinction between the public and the private. But more so, such distinctions are endeavors by students to create school as a simulation of the “real world,” a simulation in the sense of false copy. Such a clear delineation makes scholarship something of secondary importance; “real” learning occurs in “real” life outside of the confines of the classroom. This is a model of response akin to sentences of the type “words cannot describe” and is the condition of the ontological illusion as the production of doxa as Deleuze and Guattari describe it. As such, many of the papers took the form of the first paper in Appendix D, “The History of Jen Kay24 as a Scholar.” While “The History of Jen Kay as a Scholar” is typical in many respects, it was also atypical in one significant way. First, I will explore its typicality. The paper begins with a generic title. It represents the writer as someone who is actively trying to get by without doing much; the writer then has an “epiphany” that reveals the point of learning, but that epiphany is not enough because it is not “real” enough. The writer thus turns to a shocking moment which reveals some kind of traumatic experience, which the writer then uses as justification for a
24 I have changed the name of the student to protect her from any embarrassment. 122 clichéd viewpoint about learning. In the case of this paper the trauma is being “drunk off my ass” and “doing something totally out of character with some guy,” but you could easily exchange that scenario with the death of a friend or loved one, a car accident, a divorce, or breaking the law in some kind of way. But what is most typical about this kind of paper is the emphasis on the word “I.” These papers could be characterized by their subjective projections of their selves as autonomous agents overcoming attacks on their identity. In Deleuze and Guattari’s terms these attacks on their subject resemble the attack of the cheese at the dinner table: an event occurs, an affect is extracted from it (in Jen’s case it takes the form of anxiety, embarrassment, and self-doubt), the result is the identification with a generic subject experiencing a common affection. In short, the excess produced by the actualization of the affective relation is over coded and reterritorialized into the dominant discourse (the clichés): “this is my time on the edge”; “I’m going to make a lot of mistakes, but that’s all part of learning”; “I have only started to learn the important things, and I still have a long way to go.” What is atypical of Jen’s paper, and something I and my fellow teacher remarked upon in our comments, was the recognition by the writer of a kind of multiple identity thesis when she writes “I didn’t lose my identity, I lost what everyone else expected me to be.” In the margins of the paper, I wrote “Do you think that this double identity implies that there is no such thing as fixed identity? If not, then how do we understand identity and what is its role in scholarship for both school and life?” At mid-term, as I do with all papers, I put Jen’s paper on an overhead, blacked out her name, and brought it to the class for discussion. After some initial shock on the use of curse words, and its direct address of the instructors, much like the experience with “words cannot describe,” however, the student’s liked the paper for one specific reason, they admired its “honesty.” When I pointed out to them that the structure of the paper was remarkably similar to the structure of all of the other papers, I asked them how so many individuals, with so many differences, can basically produce the same paper? They were at a loss on how to respond to this question. I asked them then if the recounting of terrible experiences is often used as a way to avoid having to think about why we do the things we do? This line of questioning led nowhere, so I turned back to the text and asked them, “if you were to revise this paper, that is take a section of the paper to rethink, develop, and bring to bear on some of the things we’ve learned both about scholarship and leadership, which section or part of the paper would you explore?” The class agreed that the important part for the writer to explore was the next to last paragraph. They wanted to know more about how “learning what I like, what I want, who I am, and who I want to be” is relevant to scholarship both in school and out of life. I agreed and we moved on the next paper. Unfortunately Jen Kay decided not to revise the paper at mid-term.25 And she missed a number of classes after this. I had no way of knowing if we had opened up a raw wound, or if her time on the edge had pushed her over. Just when I had given her up for lost, she showed up during office hours, with the usual first-year student request for a second chance, which I grant almost all of the time, having been given a few in my life time. I gave the standard second chance speech explaining that because of missed classes her work would have to be exemplary, and I forgave her the revision of the narrative in order that she could focus on the annotated bibliography and the research paper, as well as the final revision of the narrative. She brought out her first version of the narrative and pointed to the comment made in the margin and asked what I meant by it, translated into the
25 Now I accept this as an example of “refusal to work” but at the time I was extremely bothered by this turn of events. 123 usual question asked by first year students: what do you want? I responded that I thought she was at a point of insight: if a person’s identity can be different from what they originally thought it was, and this difference is prompted by encounters with others, isn’t it possible to think that identity then is just a composition of one’s multiple encounters of all kinds—not just with people, but with texts of all sorts? And what if, I added, instead of turning people into texts to be read, we turned the idea around and granted to texts the status of bodies we accord to people, not that they are people, but that they are bodies with the same status of existence as people, just as materially real as people? What, I asked, would that imply about scholarship and about learning. Scholarship, I said, and life would be similar—it would be about the art of organizing encounters, and the perceived difference between them would only be an illusion. She left my office in a higher state of confusion than before, but I told her to relax, “it’s all about recognizing the possible relations one can enter into with others, broadly construed, as other people and other texts.” Over the final three weeks of the course, we went through our preparations for the final portfolio and the final revision of the narrative that was going to act as an introduction for the portfolio. I went through the usual process of preparing students for either experimental or reflective essays. We read E. B. White’s “Spring,” a disjunctive essay written in 1941 before the American entrance into World War II that celebrates the value of life in its embryonic form (literally—as his insights come through his attention to a brooder stove) against the cold winter of the Nazi onslaught in Europe; we listened to Bob Marley’s “Redemption Song” whose chorus “Please help me to sing these songs of freedom/’Cos all I ever had is redemption song” has been continuously mis-read by church youth groups for numbers of years; we read Langston Hughes' “Theme for English B” as a kind of resistance to the idea of an undifferentiated truth as the essence of all human beings, the idea that there is only sameness beneath the skin, in favor of Hughes’ construction of identity as the arrangement of one’s relations to the world; and, finally, we read Susan Griffin’s essay “Red Shoes,” which breaks down the distinction of the public and private as a primary feature of the essay form by exploiting the rhetorical figure of the chiasmus to show how the private always crosses over into the public and the political. And then, I gave them the nine-dot problem, trying to show them that the supposed insolvability of the problem is an illusion created by perspective, that we want to fix the pattern in an enclosure because our experience is guided by our understanding of ourselves as bounded entities. But, in spite of implorations to the contrary, they wanted to read the lesson of the problem as “thinking outside the box.” I said, “No, you must excise the box. There is no box. The box is an illusion. Get rid of the box." As usual a large majority of students chose the reflective option, and the few that chose the experimental option constructed variations on the structure of their first papers, extending and developing the ideas in them, but not re-thinking them. Jen Kay’s revision was the most successful, and although I did not recognize it at the time, I can see it now as an example of the kind of affirmation that Weeks through Deleuze and Nietzsche describes. The first thing one notices is the shift from the generic title to one of specific intensity: “Malcolm X Speaks to Me.” In the revision, Jen starts with the dominant metaphor of the person as bounded entity, shifting it to a glass case, implying that everybody can see through you. The case is defined as a container where one is supposed to store attributes as possessions, showing them off as if in a museum, or a case at the jewelry store. Then there is a disjunctive move to Malcolm X as a figure working against the model of the glass case. Here we also notice an intertext to Bob Marley--“they cried liberty, but were willing to settle for redemption in a white man’s world”—a link that is never
124 explained only implied, used as a kind of transfusion into the text of the connection between the bodies of the writer, the image of Malcolm X, and the text currently being produced. It is this kind of linkage, or development of relations, that makes the text successful as an experiment. In the next paragraph, Jen is assaulted by affections, impingements upon her body by outside forces, the result of many encounters. Notice the collection of affections: “the first time I got a C, or that I drank too much, or when I missed Mass….with every Saturday night, missing comma, or incongruent thought” (Appendix D). This collection is defined metaphorically as “smudges” on the glass case, literally these are incorporeal affects created by the excess of linkage. In addition, the initial distinction between school and life has been broken down. Here begins the ironic negation that will lead to affirmation and the experimental becoming: it is the endeavor to clean the glass that finally creates the transformation of the self from a rigid bounded entity to an entity with flexible, permeable surfaces. The move is a move away from fixed molar entities to a more molecular understanding of the body as always in relation: notice how the form of her body is shifted, what Jen calls “crooked” through not just the questioning of religion and what she has been taught but with reference to other intertexts as well: “my growing appreciation of June Jordan and modern art.” This is an example of another specific incorporeal transformation that remodels her body. Again, the link creates an inexpressible affective relation that the writer develops into a becoming. The ironic negation results in what Weeks referred to as the ability to “disengage from political strategies of polar opposition informed by ressentiment and reactive conceptions of identity” (Constituting 142). In this case, the ironic negation is not complete, the writer still wants to hold on to aspects of her standpoint, but even those standpoints become flexible, become different through the writer’s affirmative, sympathetic engagement with Malcolm X. Jen writes: I suppose that my skin color, my republican background, my white upper-class neighborhoods, my age and my education should keep me distant from Malcolm X. I should be deaf to his cries and his cause—he really shouldn’t speak to me. But my appreciation of martyrdom from Catholicism, my admiration for intellectuals from my education, and my regard for those who stand up for what they believe from my history, allow him to speak to me. What really makes me respect Malcolm X, though, is his freedom in spite of his situation. He attained more freedom in his oppression than the vast majority do with all of the privileges of the world. While we could certainly disagree with, and argue against some of Jen’s characterizations of Malcolm X, we see the development of a symbiotic, double relation in which the affect of the experience of her encounter with the work of Malcolm X, caught up in the larger assemblage of affects created by Bob Marley, June Jordan, and others, creates a becoming of the writer as a form of resistance. Jen further traces this line of flight through Etheridge Knight’s poem “For Malcolm.” In the only direct quotation that appears in the text, she cites the first four lines, which is all she can do before the breaking point. She begins the process of writing with the Malcolm X assemblage, not by interpreting the text of Knight's poem, but by writing with it, constituting herself differently in the process, and as a result the text literally explodes across the page. She has literalized Knight’s metaphor. The explosion takes the form of challenging the conventions of writing, but she recognizes one can only make such challenges if they recognize the relations that such conventions obscure. Every time I show this paper to my classes, invariably some one will point out that the spacing is used to fill out the required page length of the assignment. My response is that even if that’s the case, it doesn’t really matter because the writer has established
125 a position whereby such risks could be taken by writing with the Knight poem. She is not resorting to what the poem means; she is not establishing an intention for the poem; she is producing an immanent reading of the poem and Malcolm X through a reconstitution of herself and the text she is engaging with. I also scold the commenter for trying to locate a causal origin for the experiment in a generalized subject. I suggest that a better way to read the text, a more sympathetic reading, allows us to understand the writer as a link between a preformed understanding of their self and the affect of freedom as active resistance initiated by the Malcolm X assemblage. In the end, the writer reterritorializes herself with the egoistic imposition of the lines, “I am not a prisoner of my case/I use it to my advantage” which reproduces the subject, and by her repetition of the phrasing “Malcolm X speaks to me” as a sign of closure. But for a moment the writer followed the line of flight begat by the interaction of two assemblages, and an ethos of experimental sympathy emerged whereby she was able to locate the difference in itself productive of a different experience. What I learned from this experience, besides the fact you should never count a student out, is that highly complex understandings of writing--like Deleuze and Parnet’s concept of becoming--are not the sole province of professional critics or writers of literature. Becoming is a capacity of all thinking, and is directly tied to learning as the active negotiation of relations. If we are to become different, to really challenge the existing state of affairs that organizes our current capitalist milieu, then we must recognize the power of relations defined not as values but as affects that organize our collective becomings. In a recent article clarifying her discussion of the move to the posthuman, N. Katherine Hayles solidifies this point: Rather than beginning dualistically with body and embodiment, I propose instead to focus on the idea of relation and posit it as the dynamic flux from which both the body and embodiment emerge. Seeing entities emerging from specific kinds of interaction allows them to come into view not as static objects precoded and prevalued, but rather as the visible results of the dynamic ongoingness of the flux—which is in itself neither good nor bad because it precedes these evaluations, serving as the source of everything that populates my perceived world, including the body and experiences of embodiment. (“Flesh” 293) For Hayles, starting from relations allows us to rethink the famous mind/body split as the impetus behind the posthuman which challenges the idea that the mind, body and world “preexist our experiences of them” (320). Alternatively Hayles offers the relational stance…puts the emphasis instead on dynamic interactive processes from which both mindbody and world emerge together….vividly demonstrat[ing] the promise of the posthuman, which despite all its problems and dangers may open us to the realization that without relation, existence (if it is conceivable at all) would be a mean and miserable thing. We do not exist in order to relate; rather, we relate in order that we may exist as fully human beings. (“Flesh” 320) And so, to respond to Deleuze’s proclamation about the point of critique, so much engaged by Lynn Worsham, one creates a different way of feeling, another sensibility, by creating the posthuman through the process of locating the emergence of experience as the becoming of assemblages in search of a people yet to come.
126 Appendix A: Web Assignment
Sample Assignment for Using the Online Bijou Gift Book:
Feel free to copy all or part of this assignment for your classes.
Making a Web site:
1. Go to the Romantic Chronology (http://www.english.ucsb.edu:591/rchrono/). Read through some of the years before 1830, beginning perhaps as early as 1799: jot down some notes about what events, artistic, political, or literary, seem important to you. You can look again at the Longman introduction to add comments about the particular events. If you want to find out more about these particular events, you can look in encyclopedias or in general history books (as a “Subject” in the library catalogue, type in: “History Great Britain 19th”). You may be able to use the index of these various books to find out more about the particular event that interests you.
2. Spend about 10 hours reading around in books about the period: you can look at any of those listed in Blackboard under “Course Documents,” “Books about the Period,” or you can select your own books based on your own research – sometimes biographies of individual authors offer a wealth of information. Focus on finding out about events, lifestyles, art exhibitions that occur before, but close to, 1828.
Reread various selections in The Bijou (1828): http://www.muohio.edu/anthologies/bijou/ -- select one work.
1. Situate the work you have selected historically, based on your reading. What do I mean by “situating” a literary work “historically”? Well, it means that you will write 3 to 5 paragraphs about events, lifestyles, artworks, etc., which you think might help people better understand the poem or story as they read it.
2. Write 1 to 2 paragraphs about your literary work’s author. You can find out about your author in various ways:
[these are specific to Miami University of Ohio's online catalogues -- you may delete them substituting instructions for using your own online library catalogues]:
• biographical information: use the online Biography Resource Center (to be found by clicking on the “Online Reference Shelf” under “Research Resources” on Miami’s home page); if there is nothing there, check the Dictionary of National Biography, King Reference, DA28 .D4 (4 volumes). There are also other author encyclopedias in King Reference (Dictionary of Literary Biography, Ref/PN 451 .D5; Oxford Guide to British Women Writers Ref/PR 111.S48 1993).
127 • literary information: What else did the author write?
a. On the MiamiLink home page, click on “Books” under “How do I find . . .?” at the left hand side of the screen. Click on “WorldCat,” an online catalogue of almost everything that was ever published. Type in your author’s name and the dates 1800-1850. What else did he or she publish?
b. Go to MiamiLink’s catalogue, and type in “English Poetry Database” (if your work is a poem). Click on “English Poetry Database Online” and then “Connect to Database.” You might try typing a set of words that occur in a line from your poem to find out if it was ever published in a full collection, or type in your author’s name to find out what else he or she published. c. Go to MiamiLink’s “Indexes and Databases” (at the top center of the screen). Under “General Interest,” click on “Historical Catalogues and Indexes.” You can try to use any of the catalogues listed here that you think would be relevant, but also: click on “19th-Century Masterfile.” Type in your author’s name, last name, comma, first name, and then select “author” in the drop-down box: a list of reviews will come up, and, from the citations, you can get a sense of how popular your author was – you may also be able to look at some of the articles if we have those periodicals in our collection (check in the catalogue, because they are probably shelved in the SW Depository).
d. To read some reviews in American periodicals of this author’s works that are available on line, go back to the “Historical Catalogues and Indexes” page (see c above); click on American Periodical Series, then type your author’s name into Keyword. If you get too many items, you can limit by date, requesting reviews written during the author’s lifetime, for instance, or from 1800 to 1875. Writing Assignment:
1. Write 1 to 3 paragraphs interpreting the poem.
2. Write 1 to 3 very experimental paragraphs connecting the poem to our time in some way – to current events, contemporary art works, art, music, your philosophy of life. These paragraphs can be speculative. If you can find either the works you mention or essays about the events on line, or any other online images, music, or text that expresses what you are trying to say about our contemporary perspective and its relation to this early 19th-centry work, list the related URLs – ultimately, these will be live links.
Web-Page Making Assignment:
After receiving comments from me on your paragraphs, you will, instead of taking the final exam, make them into several Web pages, or a complete, freestanding Web site (possible format), that will be linked to the poem in The Bijou – permanently!! -- this is your first publication, which you can indeed list on your Résumé.
128 Appendix B:
"Samuel Taylor Coleridge's 'Work Without Hope'" by John Sonnheim
Jon Sonnheim Welcome…
…to the Miami University, ENG 342A, Later Romantics Website devoted to Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem, “Work Without Hope.” Designed in our Spring 2003 class to take a deeper look into some of the Romantic Period’s poets and their works, this website works as an accompaniment to the 1828 Gift Book, The Bijou.
Included in this website are historical perspectives of the time this poem was written, biographical information on Coleridge, a summary and interpretation of the poem, and an experimental portion relating this piece to a modern-day work. These sections can be easily navigated through the links below.
In any case, enjoy the poem, the poet, and the period that is…
Romanticism.
129 WORK ALL Nature seems at work. Slugs leave their lair—
The bees are stirring—birds are on the wing—
And WINTER slumbering in the open air,
Wears on his smiling face a dream of Spring!
And I, the while, the sole unbusy thing,
Nor honey make, nor pair, nor build, nor sing.
Yet well I ken the banks where Amaranths blow,
Have traced the forest whence streams of nectar flow,
Bloom, O ye Amaranths! Bloom for whom ye may—
For me ye bloom not! Glide, rich streams, away!
With lips unbrightened, wreathless brow, I stroll:
And would you learn the spells that drowse my soul?
WORK WITHOUT HOPE draws nectar in a sieve,
And HOPE without an OBJECT cannot live.
Historical Information
Biographical Information
Interpretation
Modern-day Relations
Sources and Links
130 Historical Information
In my opinion, the selected Coleridge poem, “Work Without Hope,” is an extremely personal and expressive piece, shedding light onto Coleridge’s own life, psyche, and mindset at the time it was written.
Despite this being a personal poem, inspirationally derived from Coleridge’s own life experiences, he was still shaped, formed, impacted, and manipulated, both as a man and as a poet, by the British social, economic, and political landscape and movements of the time period. Therefore, it is important to view and understand the world as Coleridge did, getting a general idea of the historical way of life around 1825 that led to the creation of this poem.
Ten years earlier, in 1815, had marked the end of the Napoleonic Wars, as peace was established throughout Europe, essentially ending 12 years of British-French fighting. Caught amongst the beginning and middle stages of the Industrial Revolution, a brief commercial boom was followed by an economic slump in Britain around 1817 that led to several protests and demonstrations by the angry working class. One of the major historical milestones of the era was the Peterloo Massacre in 1819, where 400 protestors were killed and wounded at a large political demonstration, showing the inner turmoil within the distinct social classes and country. The middle and lower classes were beginning to get fed up with their treatment, wages, and socio-economic positions, protesting in defense of their rights and freedoms. As the insane King George III died in 1820, ending his reign, radical political plots speckled the landscape, as his son King George IV eventually came into power. Over the next several years, as civil unrest died down in Britain, a famine emerged in Ireland around 1821, spelling conflict with the royal territories. As 1825 and the creation of
131 “Work Without Hope” drew nearer, Britain faced another economic boom, quickly followed the next year by an economic depression.
As can be seen, the backdrop of this period and poem was a turbulent time, but in relation to the rest of civilized history, is merely a blip on the map, an ordinary epoch in which there were struggles and triumphs, ups and downs. While Coleridge was undoubtedly influenced by the events in the national scene and landscape, he was far more consumed with his own personal problems, and deals with them in his poetry.
Welcome
Biographical Information
Interpretation
Modern-day Relations
Sources and Links
132 Biographical Information
Born in Ottery St. Mary, was the youngest of ten children to John and Ann Coleridge, a
minister and his wife. Often bullied by his siblings as a child, Coleridge would often run
away for several days at a time, eventually leading to the frequent imagery of nature and the outdoors in his poetry. When his father died in 1781, Coleridge was shipped off to a
London school for children of the clergy, where he lived with his uncle and became quite a
prodigy and voracious reader. In 1790 and 1791, Coleridge lost two of his siblings and was
himself very ill, inspiring him to write his first poem, “Monody,” and initiating the habit of
what would later become a lifetime opium addiction.
In 1791 and at the age of 19, Coleridge left for Cambridge, whereupon he found
himself in debt due to several vices, despite his impressive scholarship. Hoping for poetic
fame but desperate, he joined the army, deeply angering his family, although his brother
quickly arranged a discharge by means of insanity. Returning to Cambridge, Coleridge
joined up with Robert Southey, where the two quickly bonded around their political radicalism and the ideals of Pantisocracy, a proposed but never realized utopian settlement
in the United States. It was here that Southey introduced Coleridge to his wife, Sarah
133 Fricker, who happened to be the sister of Southey’s fiancé. Wed in 1795, the marriage was
shaky from the start, as Coleridge later fell in love with another Sarah, Sarah Hutchinson,
the wife of lifelong friend and poet William Wordsworth.
Although the marriage was unstable, Coleridge tried his hardest to become a
responsible adult, bringing in a respectable income through tutoring and gifts from his
poetic admirers. Life was looking up for Coleridge, as he had two sons born, David in 1796
and Berkeley in 1798, sandwiched around the 1797 publication of his Poems, a well-
received work that seemed to put him on the fast-track to fame. That was directly followed by the famous 1798 publication of Lyrical Ballads, a collaboration between Coleridge and
Wordsworth that for the most part created the Romantic movement, although neither author realized it at the time.
It was during this period of brief success however, that Coleridge’s son Berkeley died, sending him into a deep depression in which he produced little work. Around 1801, trying to recover financially and emotionally, Coleridge began work for a newspaper, although he grew sick during this period and was convinced he would soon die shortly after the birth of his daughter Sara in 1802.
134 Needing a change, a warmer climate, and hoping to escape his problems and
addictions, Coleridge moved to Malta in 1804 as a Public Secretary for the British
government, but returned to England around 1806 with his problems intact. Due to his
constant opium use, Coleridge’s paranoia and mood swings continued to get worse, as he eventually asked for and received a separation from his wife. Hardly capable of consistently working and his friendship with Wordsworth falling apart, Coleridge began writing for a newspaper again, as well as lecturing, in order to make a living.
Trying to break free from opium, he moved into the house of an apothecary named
James Gillman, looking for help in addiction recovery, although attempts were futile.
Ashamed, he broke ties with his children, not seeing them for 8 years and forcing friends
and relatives to pay their way through school. Despite all this, many in London still loved
his work and talents, eventually leading his nephew, Henry Nelson Coleridge, to publish a
collection of his conversations entitled Table Talk. Coleridge himself continued to produce
and publish new works, such as Aids to Reflection in 1825, as well as reprinting old works,
hoping to finally make a financial contribution towards his family.
By 1830, Coleridge was viewed as the finest literary critic of his day, reviews of his work becoming increasingly positive. He never gained financial security however, as he lost his pension from the Royal Society of Literature due to a governmental mistake.
135 Coleridge died peacefully in 1834, leaving behind his books and manuscripts. Although renowned today only for his poetry, Coleridge accomplished much in the literary world, although his life was filled with problems, grief, and trauma. His self-written epitaph sums up his somewhat depressing view on life, as it states:
Beneath this sod
A Poet lies; or that which once was he.
O lift one thought in prayer for S.T.C.
That he, who many a year with toil of breath,
Found Death in Life, may here find Life in Death.
Welcome
Historical Information
Interpretation
Modern-day Relations Sources and Links
Interpretation
136
Written February 21st, 1825, Coleridge’s sonnet “Work Without Hope” is about a man’s dark and depressed emotions as related to the jubilance of nature, starkly juxtaposing the somber mood of the narrator against the vivid, bright imagery of springtime. Set upon a winter day just showing the first signs of spring, the speaker laments that “all nature seems at work” (1) while he alone remains unoccupied.
The first stanza of the poem speaks upon the beauty of nature, as all of God’s creatures are slowly crawling from out their shelter to embrace the coming tides of spring. The narrator observes the “Slugs leave their lair –/The bees are stirring – birds are on the wing” (1-2). Meanwhile, the man contrasts himself against the animals as “the sole unbusy thing,/nor honey make, nor pair, nor build, nor sing” (5-6). He sees nature and, realizing and understanding its beauty, has trouble seeing and appreciating it for himself. While spring creeps upon the rest of the world and nature, the narrator is still stuck in the desolate and dreary season of winter, as can be implied through his attitude.
The second stanza further perpetuates this idea, as the speaker develops these stark contrasts even further. Speaking of the uncanny beauty and splendor of the streams and flowers surrounding him, he says,
“Bloom, O ye amaranths! Bloom for whom he may – /For me ye bloom not!” (9-10). The man knows of the beauty surrounding him, as it is everywhere he looks, yet cannot for the life of him appreciate it due to the state of depression he is in, describing himself as having “lips unbrightened” and a “wreathless brow” (11), representing his lack of success and self-imposed view of his life as a failure. Like winter, the narrator has become sterile, barren, and fruitless, having achieved no means of success. Speaking in a desperate tone, the speaker sees no hope for his own future, stuck in the desolate times of the bleak winter days, unable to see any beauty or hope of the life and nature surrounding him. It is within the last two lines of the poem that the man harshly and sharply summarizes his own mindset and life, as Coleridge writes that “Work without hope draws nectar in a sieve,/And hope without an object cannot live” (13-14). The speaker is explaining how, much like drawing nectar in a sieve is impossible, so is any work without hope, for hope cannot survive or exist without a reasonable purpose or motivation to drive it. The utter hopelessness and desperation of the 137 man is seen here within these lines, as he himself has no hope for the present or future, confining himself within the lonely cell of winter. Despite the beautiful, spring day full of life blooming around him, the narrator can only see and feel the cold hopelessness he has surrounded himself in.
In many ways, I find this poem to be extremely personal in relation to Coleridge, as opposed to a commentary on some larger, historical scale. As can be seen throughout his life, amidst constant money woes, love and family problems, and an insatiable drug habit, Coleridge was far from a happy man. I believe that the hopelessness expressed in this poem directly relates to what he was feeling in his own life, as he was essentially in a drug treatment/apothecary center at the home of James Gillman at this time, having already lost several children to premature death and undergoing separation from his wife. Coleridge was a complete mess of a man at this time, and had not even seen his own children for a period of 8 years. His world was crumbling down around him, and he could only idly sit by, watch, and remain stuck as the rest of the world rejoiced in the beauty of nature and life.
Welcome
Historical Information
Biographical Information
Modern-day Relations
Sources and Links
138 Modern-day Relations
The pervading theme of this poem, with the narrator caught up and stuck within his own personal dark, cold, melancholy hell of winter, contrasted against the new rebirth of beauty, nature, and spring in the world surrounding him, reminded me of the film Groundhog Day, starring Bill Murray, as it utilizes the same general ideas and premises. This film relates the story of a man, Phil Connors, stuck in a rut of everyday existence, bored with the bland life he has become accustomed to. Trapped within repetition, Phil has become a cynical, bitter man, as he goes about his days never appreciating life’s little gifts or taking the time to stop, look around, and admire. As a meteorologist for a local Pennsylvania television station, Phil’s job is to basically predict the future and what nature will bring us. Assigned to do a story in the small town of
Punxsutawney, home of the famous Groundhog Day celebrations and prognostications that ironically predict the end of winter, Phil becomes trapped within a single day, constantly reliving it until he can fix his attitude, his life, and break free of the eternal wintry frost he is caught in.
Connors, much like the speaker of the poem, has become jaded by life, unhappy, and hopeless, stuck in the depressing past and unable to change or move on. Connors is luckily given the chance to move on, grow, and progress, getting to live the same day over and over until he gets it right. He slowly transforms into a model citizen, saving lives, taking up countless hobbies he enjoys, and most importantly falling in love with the woman of his dreams. Although it takes many mistakes and failures along the way to reach this point, Connors gradually is able to become the man he wants to be, enabling the next day, tomorrow, to dawn and finally come, thus beginning the first days of spring as well as the rest of his life.
139 Welcome
Historical Information
Biographical Information
Interpretation
Sources and Links
140 Sources and Links
Dabundo, Laura (Editor). “Samuel Taylor Coleridge.” Encyclopedia of Romanticism: Culture in Britain, 1780’s to 1830’s. New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1992. pp. 106-113.
Gregory, Jeremy, and John Stevenson (Editors). The Longman Companion to Britain in the Eighteenth Century, 1688-1820. London: Longman, 2000. pp. 8-30.
Hoagwood, Terence Allan. Politics, Philosophy, and the Production of Romantic Texts. Dekalb, IL: Northern Illinois Press, 1996. pp. 84-87.
Sales, Roger. English Literature in History, 1780-1830: Pastoral and Politics. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1983. pp. 59, 80, 205.
“Samuel Taylor Coleridge.” Concise Dictionary of British Literary Biography, Volume 3: Writers of the Romantic Period, 1789-1832. Gale Research, 1992. Reproduced in Biography Resource Center. Farmington Hills, MI: The Gale Group, 2003. http://www.galenet.com/servlet/BioRC http://www.britannia.com/history/emptime.html (Timeline of Britain) http://english.ucsb.edu:591/rchrono/default.htm (Romantic Chronology and Timeline) http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/stc/Coleridge/stc.html (Complete Coleridge Archive run by University of Virginia…**Great Link**) http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/stc/Coleridge/poems/Work_without_Hope.html (Copy of the Poem) http://www.photoaspects.com/chesil/coleridge/ (Brief Biography)
Welcome
Historical Information
Biographical Information
Interpretation
Modern-Day Relations
141 Appendix C:
"S. T. Coleridge" by Melina Vissat
142 Samuel Taylor Coleridge
1772 - 1834
Biography of S.T.C.
Historical Situation
"Work Without Hope" Often signing his works as S.T.C. or Estese, Samuel Taylor Coleridge was one of the most recognized of the early Relating to Today Romantic poets. He is often credited, along with his peers William Blake and William Wordsworth, with the true beginning of the Romanticism movement. Home This Web site was created for the purpose of my ENG 342 class, "Later British Romantic Writers," taught by Professor Laura Mandell at Miami University. It Visit The Bijou investigates Coleridge's poem, "Work Without Hope" in the context of his life and historical situation.
Coleridge's "Work Without Hope" appears in The Bijou, "An Annual of Literature And The Arts" published in 1828. These little gilted, embossed hardcover books were often given as romantic gifts from men to women, and were looked upon as lower literature by celebrated authors and poets "The most happy marriage I of the time. These gift books were a true can picture or imagine to symbol of the bourgeois; ostentacious in myself would be the union of design and full of poor taste in writing and a deaf man to a blind content, they were readily snapped up by woman." middle class readers in their attempt to prove their inner aristocracy. - S.T.C.
143
However, these gift books still contain the work of recognized writers of the higher literary vein; contributors include Charles Lambe, Robert Southey, Sir Thomas E. Croft, Lady Caroline Lambe and William Fraser. These cultured writers, it seems, only wrote for The Bijou if they were in dire need of money. And those living the life of the Romantic poet often were.
Questions or discussion?
Contact Me
Comments or suggestions?
Contact Professor Mandell
April 22, 2003
This site was made using DreamWeaver MX® and Adobe PhotoShop®
144
Biography of S.T.C.
Biography of S.T.C.
Historical Situation
"Work Without Hope" Born in 1772, Samuel Taylor Coleridge Relating to Today lived the classic less-than-poetic life of a Romantic poet. The youngest of ten children, Coleridge endured the attention of Home bullying siblings and the neglect of a distant mother throughout his life. After the Visit The Bijou death of his father, Coleridge was sent to live with an uncle in London to attend a charity school. An avid reader, Coleridge became quite the prodigy, eventually earning first place in his class. In 1791, he headed to Cambridge with hopes of poetic fame. He soon became ill around this time and began taking laudanum for the illness, beginning a lifelong opium addiction. He was poor despite scholarships, and soon acquired even more debt due to opium, alcohol and women. So the broke young scholar briefly joined the army, enraging his family when they found out, and prompting "There is no such thing as a a return to Cambridge. It was there he met worthless book though there Robert Southey, and the two young men are some far worse than became instant friends. Both politically worthless; no book that is radical, they began planning Pantisocracy, not worth preserving, if its their own socio-political movement existence may be tolerated; designed to be settled in America. Although as there may be some men engaged to another woman, Coleridge whom it may be proper to married Southey’s sister in 1795. Coleridge hang, but none should be and Southey eventually argued over their suffered to starve" Pantisocracy and their plans, along with their friendship, disintegrated. However, - S.T.C. Southey introduced Coleridge to William Wordsworth, sparking friendship between Visit this site for an online the two. Coleridge eventually divorced collection of some of Southey’s sister and re-married Coleridge's work Wordsworth’s sister-in-law.
145 It appeared as though Coleridge had found fame with his well- received Poems, published in 1797. In 1798, the famous collaboration between Coleridge and Wordsworth, the "Lyrical Ballads," was published, identifying the Romantic movement. However, illness and opium continued to plague Coleridge, draining him financially. He turned to newspaper work in 1801 to try to recover his finances. After a brief stint in Malta from 1804 to 1806, Coleridge returned to England and divorced his second wife. His opium addiction was getting stronger, even after a brief attempt at quitting, and his paranoia and mood swings increased along with the drug. Turning back to newspaper work in 1817, most of his writing at this time was non-fiction, except for a couple of plays, and included such works as "Biographia Literaria." A nephew published a collection of Coleridge’s works called "Table Talk", and Coleridge began publishing works both new and old.
By 1830, reviews of Coleridge’s work hailed him as the finest critic of his day. Financial security, however, still eluded him, as he lost his pension from the Royal Society of Literature, his one remaining reliable source of income. Coleridge died in 1834, penniless, leaving only manuscripts behind. Although known mainly for his poetry today, Coleridge contributed far more to the field of English criticism and language than he is recognized for.
There are prevalent themes throughout Coleridge's life that help readers with the interpretation of "Work Without Hope." First of all, Coleridge's laudanum addiction drained him not only of money and material worth, but of self-esteem as well. Unable to understand addiction during the 18th century, society saw it as a character flaw to be so dependent upon a chemical substance. Sadly enough, Coleridge battled his illness all throughout his life, enduring feelings of hopelessness in ever succeeding against the drug. Related to his addiction is the fact that Coleridge never had any money or true material possession; he was penniless. No matter how hard he worked at his writing, there was still no hope of ever making a decent wage that he would not throw away on acquiring more laudanum. Coleridge, however, was well aware of his lack of success. He must have felt purposeless and useless in such a productive time in history.
Not only did Coleridge suffer with monetary and addiction problems, but he also had issues with interpersonal relationships. His friendship with Southey fell apart, and he divorced two wives. These incidents did not help Coleridge in either his self-esteem or his idea of success. When writing "Work Without Hope," Coleridge explores all these areas. He must have despaired about his chronic observation of the world, recognizing his lack of active participation. Has he contributed nothing? Read "Work Without Hope" and find out...
146
Historical Situation
Biography of S.T.C.
Historical Situation
"Work Without Hope"
Relating to Today The Romantic era was just beginning as Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) was creating his Home poetry and prose. Known as one of the early Romantic poets, along with Wordsworth and Blake, Visit The Bijou Coleridge was writing during one of the most politically tumultuous times in Western European history. With the French Revolution in full swing in 1789, new ideas and radical politics were on the rise, along with a constant fear that such chaos could start in Great Britain. With the British monarchy frightened for the continuity of their reign, they cracked down on the general population, enraging intellectuals and the lower classes alike.
As the Terror continued into1793, taking the lives of French aristocrats, the British monarchy was horrified at the realization of the power of the general population and passed acts prohibiting large "Talent, lying in the groups from meeting together to incite a similar understanding, is often revolution in Great Britain. Intellectuals, on the other inherited; genius, being the hand, simply revolted against these measures of action of reason or censorship and control as ordained by the British imagination, rarely or never" government. Their radical thoughts, politics and writings led the way into the era known as the - S.T.C. Romantic period.
Romantic intellectuals moved away from tradition and classicism, shunning superstition and conformity. Instead, experimentation took control; forms were altered with fantastical ideas and secularization. Laudanum became popular; writers such as Coleridge, Blake and Thomas Quincy would use it for illness and imagination without understanding the consequences of addiction.
147 Newspaper circulation increased as awareness spread in society. Books and literature were seen as a way for the newly liberated middle class to attempt a bourgeois movement into a parody of British aristocracy. Liberty, equality, and women’s rights became themes; idealistic in nature, the demand for writers and exploration increased. According to male writers, Romanticism became feminine in nature, forming arguments for feminism and breaking traditionally held views on the female’s role in society. With the publication of Mary Wollstonecraft’s “Vindication of the Rights of Women,” feminism came into British society, and was one aspect of the Romantic vision. Conventional beliefs were broken.
Nature and the natural world fell under the intellectual microscope. Percy Bysshe Shelley addressed such a theme in his 1817 “Mont Blanc,” a poem that questions nature’s role in religion. This theme is prevalent in Coleridge’s “Work Without Hope,” as he compares his role, which he considers purposeless, to the productive attitudes of the natural world. Ideas of separating beauty from that which is beautiful exploded; poets and writers alike opened up their minds to embrace the world that surrounded them. Everything was up for thought and dissection during the Romantic era; it was a time to question.
148
"Work Without Hope"
1825
Biography of S.T.C.
Historical Situation
"Work Without Hope"
Relating to Today
Home ALL Nature seems at work. Slugs leave their lair— Visit The Bijou The bees are stirring—birds are on the wing— And WINTER, slumbering in the open air, Wears on his smiling face a dream of Spring! And I, the while, the sole unbusy thing, Nor honey make, nor pair, nor build, nor sing.
Yet well I ken the banks where amaranths blow, Have traced the fount whence streams of nectar flow. Bloom, O ye amaranths! bloom for whom ye may, For me ye bloom not! Glide, rich streams, away! With lips unbrighten'd, wreathless brow, I stroll: And would you learn the spells that drowse my "Works of imagination soul? should be written in very WORK WITHOUT HOPE draws nectar in a sieve, plain language; the more And HOPE without an OBJECT cannot live. purely imaginative they are the more necessary it is to Written in 1825, Coleridge’s “Work Without be plain" Hope” is a sonnet relating nature to the emotions of the speaker. The imagery used - S.T.C. throughout the poem is both a reflection of the natural world and a reference to the speaker’s mental state. Seasons are used in the poem to relate what the speaker is feeling, and how it affects his life. Described as “lines composed on a day in February,” or during the beginning of spring, we realize that the speaker is truly contemplating the ideas presented throughout the poem.
149
“Work Without Hope” is a sonnet, although it is not written in traditional sonnet form. The development of the poem is presented the same way as in a sonnet; the poem develops in the first 12 lines. The last two lines then present the overall theme of the poem to the reader. Throughout this poem the speaker observes nature at work, and uses the activity to set up a contrast between himself and a busy natural world. This is illustrated throughout the first six lines of the poem, which discuss the beauty of nature using classic terms – "slugs leave their lair/ the bees are stirring – birds are on the wing". The contrast is made quite apparent here: “And I, the while, the sole unbusy thing,/ Nor honey make, nor pair, nor build, nor sing.” We learn that the speaker has come to the realization that while nature is beautiful, he struggles to identify himself within this world of purpose and business. Instead, we see him as an observer, not a participant. These are personal themes throughout Coleridge's life; he often battled with feelings of failure due to a variety of life events. Please refer to the Biography of S.T.C. for more information on this topic. Although Coleridge’s phrase, “WINTER slumbering in the open air/ Wears on his smiling face a dream of Spring” appears trite and unconvincing, this contrived sentence sets up this idyllic setting as a foil for what the speaker has to say about his own purposelessness.
The speaker then develops his conscious thought in the next six lines. Although aware of the beauty that surrounds him, he is also conscious of the unsuccessful picture he presents to such a scene. This is clear when the speaker addressed the world around him, saying, “Bloom, O ye Amaranths! Bloom for whom ye may/ For me ye bloom not! Glide, rich streams, away!” The speaker recognizes that this beauty does not exist for him, and he sees himself as a poor recipient for the natural world. This parallel between nature and man is a prevalent theme throughout Romantic literature, often elaborated upon by Percy Bysshe Shelley, among others. Amaranths, coincidentally, are unfading flowers, and exist as yet another contrast to a speaker who is fading as we speak. He is well aware that he possesses a lack of success: “With lips unbrightened, wreathless brow, I stroll” illustrates his deficiency as compared to this productive natural scene. The speaker is full of despair; he realizes that he has contributed nothing. He is as sterile as the winter that preceded this productive spring season.
150
Relating to Today
Biography of S.T.C. There are two major themes that I will interpret and attribute to modern day. First of all, themes Historical Situation of nature reflecting the human spirit are quite prevalent today. In 2003, there has been a resurgence in society's identification with and "Work Without Hope" return to nature. Through rampant globalization and constant eco-awareness, nature has Relating to Today become the perfect foil to reflect how far humans have come away from our once- Home familiar natural beginnings. With the hustle and bustle of modern life, society often has to Visit The Bijou purposefully throw on the brakes in order to find simplicity in the core of such a scheduled existence. This simplicity is often observed in the close examination of nature. Not only do we as a society use it as a reflection and a reminder of ourselves, but we also take the opportunity to examine it closer in order to find what we like to ordain as beauty and truth.
Artists such as Georgia O’Keeffe still astound viewers with their renditions of the natural world. O'Keeffe's close-up portraits of the intimate inner workings of flowers and plants brings us back to the natural world of purpose "When a man mistakes and use; there are no true extraneous affairs in his thoughts for persons nature. Following in this vein of simplicity found in nature, Buddhism and Tai Chi are back in and things, he is mad."- vogue as society attempts to re-connect with S.T.C. what they have spent all of civilization isolating themselves from. Trends such as raw foodism are taking over as the newest coastal fads. Not only as nature proved to be a true foil for our human ways, but it also provides us with another medium with which to reconnect with ourselves.
Secondly, moving away from the theme of nature and the natural 151 world, Coleridge's "Work Without Hope" primarily focuses on the role purpose and responsibility play in our society, even today. As the speaker points out in the poem, he has "lips unbrightened" and a "wreathless brow;" he is without purpose as he strolls along through a world full of busy work. This raises many questions about our own human need to claim success in order to ward off feelings of despair. Are we machines? Is our only purpose to work? To create? What defines purpose or utility?
Coleridge may have believed himself to be worthless - the speaker of "Work Without Hope" is almost definitely without hope. In today's time these are questions that society is still trying to answer. With the influx of today's rampant consumerism and marketing, people are being reduced to machines simply through their availablity to purchase; the masses have become targets on which businesses and advertisers focus. So then is the purpose of the general American public simply to buy and contribute to an active economy? Perhaps Coleridge would be interested in the idea that if an individual did not participate in capitalism, he or she would be without purpose in today's time. It's a theme of thought started by the Romantics, and set into context today, can be limitless in its thought-provoking possibilities.
152 Appendix D: “The History of Jen Kay as a Scholar” and “Malcolm X Speaks to Me” The History of Jen Kay as a Scholar As soon as the bell rang at 11:15, I was in a mad rush to collect my books from my locker and find a corner in the lunch room. There, I would have about fifty minutes to copy Pre- Calculus answers out of the back of the book, read the cliff notes on Hamlet, and make up an essay on the Bull Run battles, all of which were due that day. To say the least, my history as a scholar was more about getting good grades than learning. In fact, the only thing that twelve years of public school education taught me was how to be a slacker and get away with it. I must admit that Grandview Heights High taught me well because I had perfected the practice to an art; not only did I get away with it, but I was awarded with a National Honors Society membership, scholar-athlete banquets, and a scholarship to Miami University. Although I won many awards throughout my academic career, I had not truly become a scholar until my freshman year of college. In high-school, I was mainly an academic scholar, though I had no thirst for truth, nor any craving for knowledge. I just wanted to know if it was going to be on the test. I memorized facts for chemistry, biology, and history, and forgot them as soon as I finished the test. I went through all my classes this way until my sophomore english [sic] class. Mrs. Sorensen was my teacher that year and she helped me learn to appreciate great literature, analyze poetry and prose, and put personality into my writing; in short, she taught me to love English. I guess you could say I had an epiphany my sophomore year, at least a partial one, because English became the only exception to the rule: I tried to learn and appreciate different authors and styles, but every other class was just a grade. I have had two epiphanies in my life time, the first occurred with Sorensen, and the second took place during my first semester of college. I changed from a scholar of academics to a scholar of life. In high-school, there isn’t much you need to learn in terms of how the world works; high-school is nothing like the real world. All you basically needed to learn is how to be an absolute conformist, and realize where you fit in the social scheme of things. Needless to say, everyone had their identity: you were either a jock, cheerleader, brain, or a freak (we’ve all seen it on tv). I, Jen Kay, had my own identity. I wasn’t one of the pretty girls, but I was smart, and I was strong, and I was content with who I thought I was. I don’t think anyone has seen a more confused freshman than I was about two months ago: everything I knew was falling apart. Although at the time I thought it was just my shitty luck, I now know that the chaos of my freshman year was the best thing to happen. I guess it’s elementary logic to predict that a person with strict catholic [sic] morals, mother, and household rules would go a little crazy with the new freedoms that await a college freshman. So I guess that my grades and behavior shouldn’t have surprised me, but they sure did shock the hell out of my mom. To say the least, I wasn’t working up to my potential. I was getting a C in the “easy- A-jock-science-class,” my catholic [sic] morality had reached an all time low, and worst of all, I didn’t know who I was anymore. My epiphany couldn’t have come at a better time. It all happened one night, not long ago, at a fraternity party. I was drunk off my ass and caught myself with a guy doing something totally out of character. I left the party in tears. I kept asking myself what the hell I was doing, and who had I become. It hit me after I had cried all of the tears out of my dehydrated body: I didn’t lose my identity, I lost what everyone else expected me to be. I realized that I couldn’t have my own identity by only experiencing a little suburb outside of Columbus. So this is my
153 time on the edge. I’m learning about what I like, what I want, who I am, and who I want to be. Sure, I’m going to make a lot of mistakes, but that’s all part of learning, all part of being a scholar. So Dom and Malea, as you can see my history of being a scholar is rather brief. I have only started to learn the important things, and I still have a long way to go. And although I sound like a plug for a “continuing education” ad, my success and failures, in and outside of the classroom, will help me learn perhaps the most important thing: the history of Jen Kay as a person. Malcolm X Speaks to Me
We are all surrounded by a glass case. It contains and restrains the way we think and act so that we can be what everyone else wants. Although it is transparent, we can see everyone and judge them accordingly. We try our best to keep it clean and neat and fit into it as well as we can. My glass case’s frame is composed of five paragraph essays, perfect grammar, trust in people, and faith in god [sic]. It is lined with good grades, republican politics, linear ideas, and catholic [sic] morality. Without a smudge nor stain: drug free, innocent, and conformed. I sleepishly filled it with nice words, blind acceptance, and appreciation of Shakespeare. I tried to be what everyone else told me to be. Malcolm X recognized the sleepy sheep who sat contently in their cases, unaware and ignorant, safe in their traditions and in conformity. He was suffocated within the perfectly square, transparent box filled with tolerance and patience of the socially acceptable. They cried liberty, but were willing to settle for redemption in a white man’s world. Malcolm X, with his angry words and nationalist ideals broke out…Malcolm X cried freedom. When success is measured by how well your case is kept, I suppose that it is hard to want to break free. I guess that at first, I didn’t want to either. When I came to college, it was spotless: National Honor’s Society, mass every Sunday, I regurgitated everything I was told. So the first time that I got a C, or that I drank too much, or when I missed mass, I tried frantically to wipe the smudges away, to appear clean again. But with every Saturday night, missing comma, or incongruent thought, the smudges became stains and pieces of glass broke off. When I tried to piece them back together, they didn’t quite fit the same. My frame became crooked when I questioned my religion, what I was taught, and with my growing appreciation of June Jordan and modern art. My dilapidated case became too cumbersome, and soon I realized that I didn’t want it anymore. The fragile and impermeable glass is shattered, but it is replaced with a screen, and the rigid frame ahs become more flexible. My blind acceptance and the need to please others fell out. I no longer seek the safely [safety] embodied within the case. Although I still interpret with a white, republican, Catholic screen, I do not allow it to make me ignorant to those on the other side. Instead, every new experience allows the flexible frame to expand, and every new view I’m exposed to enlarges the holes in my screen. I am not sheltered by the safe confines of the rigid case anymore; the risks that I take in my soft shell leave me exposed. Malcolm’s case was composed of the non-violent activism, the hopes of integration, and the belief in a dream that entrapped the Black community. He shattered his glass when he called for military action, and he distorted his frame when he challenged the community to strive for Black nationalism. The poetic verse and dreams of King could only reach the boundaries of the case with the contentment of redemption. Malcolm X stretched it’s [its] limits with his harsh words and unconformed ideals that called for freedom. He didn’t hide in the safety of the case.
154 He took the risk of standing up against an entire nation and challenging the basis of its government, and that made him vulnerable. His ideals scared the shit out of those who were shaped by their cases, the way they looked and talked about him made it clear. He may have been shewed away, or even shot down by one of his own, but at least he wasn’t trapped anymore. I suppose that my skin color, my republican background, my white upper-class neighborhoods, my age and my education should keep me distant from Malcolm X. I should be deaf to his cries and his cause—he really shouldn’t speak to me. But my appreciation of martyrdom from Catholicism, my admiration for intellectuals from my education, and my regard for those who stand up for what they believe from my history, allow him to speak to me. What really makes me respect Malcolm X, though, is his freedom in spite of his situation. He attained more freedom in his oppression than the vast majority do with all of the privileges of the world. “Compose for Red a proper verse; Adhere to foot and strict iamb; Control the burst of angry words Or they might boil and break the dam” (Knight 50).
So forget the five paragraph essay form forget the commas and the apostrophes
forget spacing and margins and tabs
But most of all forget the glass case
its constraints
155 and its expectations
“Set your own standards, and make those the only ones
you live by” (I don’t know where the hell I got it).
Sorry Kennedy and King if his words were too harsh
Sorry White Christian Society if you couldn’t control him
Sorry if he didn’t want to take it sitting down
Sorry Mom if I’m not who you thought
Sorry is drinking and getting high is wrong
Sorry if my hormones get in the way
I am not a prisoner of my case
156 I use it to my advantage
So, maybe I wasn’t exactly who Malcolm X had in mind
Nevertheless, Malcolm x speaks to me.
157 Appendix E: Glossary of Selected Terms Actual and Virtual: Because there is always more to experience than we can see, Deleuze uses the concept of the virtual to explain it. From Deleuze’s viewpoint, we make a mistake by relying on the actual to explain experience, because the actual is always already an abstraction of the virtual and chaotic plane of immanence that is life. The actual is a differentiation of the virtual, a creative actualization that is often caught up in some transcendent mode of thought--for example, positing God, the Law, or the Subject as the guarantor of experience. Deleuze wishes to challenge the Kantian Copernican Revolution (his assemblage) by refusing the human subject as the condition of possibility for knowledge in favor of the material, immanent flux of the virtual as the real condition of experience. Thus, there is not a difference in degree between the actual and the virtual; there is a difference in kind. Deleuze is fond of the example of how DNA is virtual while the human body is actual. There is no similarity at all; rather there is a complete difference between the Structure of DNA and the structure of the bodies that correspond to it. Focusing on the real condition of experience creates possibilities for immanent becomings. In terms of traditional conceptualizations of phenomena, we could say affects are virtual and emotions are actual, percepts are virtual and perceptions are actual, problems are virtual and concepts are actual, the plane of immanence is virtual and the plane of transcendence is actual, molecular bodies are virtual and molar identities are actual, sense is virtual and meaning is actual. Affect: a material, prepersonal, and virtual bodily sensation unattached to any representational concept; a feeling. An affect is a virtual aspect of experience. Assemblage: social machines that extend and organize by coding prepersonal matter into institutions; there are two dimensions to assemblages: a collective assemblage of enunciation and a machinic assemblage of desire. Assemblages orient bodies into molar and molecular forms. Becoming: assembling virtual percepts and affects along a line of deterritorialization to maximize difference and minimize similarity. Body: a relation of active and passive, virtual and actual, incorporeal and corporeal forces. As such, anything can be a body: a person, a text, a discipline, and a political unit like a nation. Creativity/experimentation: For Deleuze all acts in experience are creative. Some acts build relations of capture through logics of representation and transcendence that reduce the capacity of life towards difference; other creative acts constitute relations of becoming and maximize life towards difference. Critical Affirmation: the active destruction of the representational; the reactive, and the negative for the purposes of affirming the positivity of life. Deterritorialization, reterritorialization, and territorialization: Assemblages territorialize bodies into molar, or fixed identities through a process of coding experience. This process is not to be understood as ideological; it is a creative act of assembling that is one of the capacities of a body. Bodies also have the capacity to deterritorialize by escaping from these fixed and determined identities by becoming molecular; that is, through combining with the affects and percepts of other bodies to become different. Reterritorialization is the return of a molecular form to a molar form and can be positive or negative. All of life is the result of these processes. Fold(ing): a body's process of individuation through the interiorization of experience, also known as subjectification. Bodies are part of the plane of immanence; they become fixed molar entities by contracting the prepersonal chaotic flux, that is by folding together the disparate flux
158 of experience into a perceived unity. In the same way that internal organs develop through the process of layers of matter folding in upon one another, so also do subjects form. Becoming is the practice of unfolding these disparate parts along lines of deterritorialization. Immanence: the chaotic flows of difference that constitute life and from which thought and extension emerge as two different viewpoints on chaos from which bodies are formed. In Spinozist terms, the chaos of difference is substance; thought and extension are attributes; and bodies are modes. When Deleuze and Guattari write about the plane of immanence, or composition, they are exploring this chaotic field of prepersonal flux that makes up experience. When they write about the plane of transcendence, or consistency, they are writing about how bodies are reterritorialized or molarized by transcendent accounts of experience, or the three illusions of consciousness, theology, and morality, which Deleuze outlines in Spinoza: Practical Philosophy. Immanence can be understood, then, as absolute deterritorialization, and is sometimes referred to as the “body without organs.” Incorporeal transformation: In Deleuze and Guattari’s performative understanding of language, language captures bodies through incorporeal transformations. In a mild critique of Austin’s theory of performativity, which relies on authority to establish illocutionary force, Deleuze and Guattari use the example of a hijacker taking over an airplane. By announcing the takeover of the plane, the hijacker does not change the bodies on board; the hijacker affects a transformation of the bodies' possible relations as they now have become hostages. This is one reason why Deleuze is so adamant that relations are always external to their terms. Image of thought: the image we have of what it means it to think. The dominant image of thought, governed by representation, suffers from a number of errors: it reduces difference to identity; it reduces thinking to opinion as a common sense; and it presupposes that thought is always good. Deleuze argues along with Heidegger that we have not yet started thinking. His aim is to create a thought without image about which we can only say that such a thought is interesting (in the strong sense) or remarkable. Micropolitics: the analytical process of showing how a body’s forces (affects, percepts, sense, experiences) are coded by assemblages in order to resist that coding through becoming. Ethology, like schizoanalysis, rhizomatics, and other terms created by Deleuze and Guattari, is a mode of micropolitics. Molar: a fixed identity predicated upon the belief that all objects are bounded entities with inviolable borders which mark the inside and the outside. A molar body is constituted by the coding of virtual experience by assemblages. Molecular: bodies that are open mixtures of multiple forces in the process of becoming along a line of deterritorialization. A molecular body resists the coding of its experiences. Order-words: utterances (written or verbal) that create incorporeal transformations of capture by coding experience. Deleuze and Guattari define language by the sum total of order-words in a given regime of signification. Pass-words: utterances that make possible lines of deterritorialization and becoming through the decoding of experience; pass-words are virtual affects and percepts unencumbered by representation. Percept: a material, prepersonal and virtual sensation of thought unattached to any representation; a thought without image. Relations: how persons move from given ideas or impressions to ideas and impressions that are not given. Deleuze follows Hume in suggesting that humans habitually move between the given (the actual) and the not given (the virtual) by invoking principles of contiguity, resemblance, and
159 causality. In such cases, relations between terms are always predetermined retrospectively, and the differences between terms are elided. Deleuze argues that all relations are external to their terms in order to bring to the fore the difference that motivates all movement. Deleuze, then, explores differential relations as an aspect of the real conditions of experience (the virtual) which makes possible all kinds of combinations of knowledge and life never thought about. As such, terms exist because of relations and not the other way around. Spinozist Assemblage: A collection of philosophers, political theorists, feminist scholars, and other thinkers committed to an immanent and univocal ontology directly constitutive of an ethic of resistance to the dominant codes of life that makes all bodies slaves to transcendent forces such as theology, subjectivity, nation-states, and global capitalism. A partial list includes Gilles Deleuze, Antonio Negri, Pierre Macherey, Etienne Balibar, Elizabeth Grosz, Michael Hardt, Aurelia Armstrong, Genevieve Lloyd, Moira Gatens, Norman O. Brown, William E. Connolly, and Warren Montag.
160 Works Cited Allen, Julia M. and Lester C. Faigley. "Discursive Strategies for Social Change: An Alternative Rhetoric for Argument." Rhetoric Review 14 (1995): 142-172. Aristotle. On Rhetoric: A Theory of Civic Discourse. Trans. George A. Kennedy. New York: Oxford U P, 1991. Armstrong, Aurelia. “Agency Reconfigured: Narrative Continuities and Connective Transformations." Contretemps (2002): 42-53. Badiou, Alan. Deleuze: The Clamor of Being. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1999. Baillif, Michelle. “Seducing Composition: A Challenge to Identity-Disclosing Pedagogies.” Rhetoric Review 16 (1997): 76-91. Barthes, Roland. "Myth Today." Strucuralism in Myth: Levi-Strauss, Barthes, Dumezil, Propp. Ed. Robert A. Segal. New York: Garland, 1996. 1-30. Bartholomae, David. “A Reply to Stephen North.” Pre/Text 11 (1990): 121-30. Basgall, Richard J. “On Teaching Relationships.” Ohmann and Coley 182-5. Bataille, Georges. The Accursed Share: An Essay on General Economy. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Zone, 1988. Bateson, Gregory. Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution, Epistemology. Northvale, NJ: Aronson, 1987. Baudrillard, Jean. Selected Writings. Second edition. Ed. Mark Poster. Stanford: Stanford U P, 2000. Bell, Jeffrey. “Philosophizing the Double Bind: Deleuze Reads Nietzsche.” Philosophy Today. 39.4 (1995): 371-391. Berlin, James A. "Contemporary Composition: The Major Pedagogical Theories." College English 44 (1982): 765-77. ---. “English Studies, Work, and the New Economy.” Bloom, et al. 215-225. ---. "Revisionary History: The Dialectical Method." Rethinking the History of Rhetoric. Ed. Takis Poulakos. Denver, CO: Westview P, 1993. 135-152. ---. Rhetoric and Ideology in the Writing Class.” College English 50 (1988): 477-94. ---. Rhetoric and Reality: Writing Instruction in American Colleges, 1900-1985. Carbondale: Southern Illinois U P, 1987. The Bijou, Or Annual of Literature and the Arts. Ed. Laura Mandell. Online. London: William Pickering, 1828. June 11, 2003. < http://www.orgs.muohio.edu/anthologies/ bijou/index.html> Bizzell. Patricia. The Intellectual Work of ‘Mixed’ Forms of Academic Discourse.” ALT DIS: Alternative Discourse and the Academy. Christopher Schroeder, Helen Fox, and Patricia Bizzell, eds. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook, 2002. 1-10. Bloom, Lynn Z. Composition Studies as a Creative Art: Teaching, Writing, Scholarship, Administration. Logan, UT: Utah State U P, 1998. Bloom, Lynn Z., Donald A. Daiker, and Edward M. White, eds. Composition in the Twenty- First Century: Crisis and Change. Carbondale: Southern Illinois U P, 1996. Bogard, William. “Sense and Segmentarity: Some Markers of Deleuzian-Guattarian Sociology.” Sociological Theory 16 (1998): 52-74. Bradley, F. H. Appearance and Reality: A Metaphysical Essay. New York: Macmillan, 1902. Bridwell-Bowles, Lillian. “Discourse and Diversity: Experimental Writing within the Academy.” College Composition and Communication 43 (1992): 349-68.
161 ---. “Freedom, Form, Function: Varieties of Academic Discourse: College Composition and Communication 46 (1995): 45-61. Britton, James. The Development of Writing Abilities (11-18). Urbana, IL: NCTE, 1992. Burke, Kenneth. Permanence and Change. 3rd ed. Berkeley: U of California P, 1984. Carter, Locke. Argument in Hypertext: Writing Strategies and the Problem of Order in a Nonsequential World.” Computers and Composition. 20.1 (2003): 3-22. Cassirer, Ernst. An Essay on Man: An Introduction to a Philosophy of Human Culture. New Haven: Yale U P, 1944. Colebrook, Claire. Gilles Deleuze. Routledge Critical Thinkers Series. London: Routledge, 2001. ---. “Happiness, Theoria, and Everyday Life.” Symploke 11 (2003): 132-51. ---. Irony. The New Critical Idiom Series. London: Routledge, 2003. Cherwitz, Richard A. and James W. Hikins. Communication and Knowledge: An Investigation in Rhetorical Epistemology. Columbia, SC: U of South Carolina P, 1986. Cixous, Helene and Catherine Clement. The Newly Born Woman. Trans. Besty Wing. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1986. Cliff, Michelle. "If I Could Write this In Fire, I Would Write This In Fire." Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology. Ed. Barbara Smith. Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers U P, 2000. 15- 30. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. "Work without Hope." The Bijou, Or Annual of Literature and the Arts. Connolly, William E. The Ethos of Pluralization. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1995. ---. Neuropolitics: Thinking, Culture Speed. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2002. ---. Why I Am Not a Secularist. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1999. Crowley, Sharon. The Methodical Memory: Invention in Current Traditional Rhetoric. Carbondale: Southern Illinois U P, 1990. Dale, Catherine Mary. "A Queer Supplement: Reading Spinoza after Grosz." Hypatia 14.1 (1999): 37-61. Davis, D. Diane. "Finitude's Clamor: Or, Notes Toward a Communitarian Literacy." College Composition and Communication 53 (2001): 119-145. Delanda, Manuel. “Deleuzian Ontology: A Sketch.” New Ontologies: Transdisciplinary Objects. University of Illinois. March 30, 2002. August 9, 2003.
162 ---. The Logic of Sense. Trans. Mark Lester Charles Stivale. Ed. Constantin V. Boundas. New York: Columbia U P, 1990. ---. Negotiations: 1972-1990. Trans. Martin Joughin. New York: Columbia U P, 1995. ---. Nietzsche and Philosophy. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson. New York: Columbia U P, 1983. ---. Spinoza: Practical Philosophy. Trans. Robert Hurley. San Francisco: City Lights, 1988. Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: U Minnesota P, 1987. ---. What is Philosophy. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell. New York: Columbia U P, 1994. Deleuze, Gilles and Claire Parnet. Dialogues. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. New York: Columbia U P, 1987. Derrida, Jaques. Of Grammatology. Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1998. ---. "Plato's Pharmacy." Dissemination. Trans. Barbara Johnson. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1981. 61-84. Douglas, Mary. Natural Symbols: Explorations in Cosmology. New York: Vintage, 1973. Drucker, Peter. Post-Capitalist Society. New York: Harperbusiness, 1994. Ebert, Teresa L. Ludic Feminism and After: Postmodernism, Desire, and Labor in Late Capitalism. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1996. Ede, Lisa and Andrea Lunsford. "Audience Addressed/Audience Evoked." College Composition and Communication 35 (1984): 155-67. Elbow, Peter. "Reflections on Academic Discourse: How It Relates to Freshman and Colleagues." College English 53 (February 1991): 135-55. Faigley, Lester C. Fragments of Rationality: Postmodernity and the Subject of Composition. Pittsburg: U of Pittsburg P, 1992. Ferguson, Kathy E. The Man Question: Visions of Subjectivity in Feminist Theory. Berkeley: U of California P, 1993. Foucault, Michel. Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth. Ed. Paul Rabinow. Trans. Robert Hurley and Others. New York: New Press, 1997. ---. "Preface to Transgression." Language, Counter-Memory, Practice. Ed. and trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon. Ithaca: Cornell U P, 1977. Fox, Tom. The Social Uses of Writing. Norwood, NJ: Ablex, 1990. France, Allan W. “Dialectics of Self: Structure and Agency as the Subject of English.” College English 63 (2000): 145-65. Gallop, Jane. Feminist Accused of Sexual Harassment.. Durham: Duke U P, 1997. Gatens, Moira. “Feminism as ‘Pass-word’: Rethinking the ‘Possible’ with Spinoza and Deleuze.” Hypatia 15 (2000): 61-75. ---. Imaginary Bodies. Ethics, Power, and Corporeality. London: Routledge, 1996. Gatens, Moira and Genevieve Lloyd. Collective Imaginings. London: Routledge, 1999. Goleman, Judith. Working Theory: Critical Composition Studies for Students and Teachers. Westport, CT: Bergin & Garvey, 1995. Gore, Jennifer. The Struggle for Pedagogies: Critical and Feminist Discourse as Regimes of Truth. New York: Routledge, 1993. Griffin, Susan. "Red Shoes." The Politics of the Essay: Feminist Perspectives. Ed. Ruth-Ellen Boetcher Joeres and Elizabeth Mittman. Bloomington: Inidiana U P, 1993. 1-11. Groundhog Day. Dir. Harold Ramis. Columbia/Tristar Studios, 1993.
163 Grossberg, Lawrence. “Animations.” Animations (of Deleuze and Guattari). Ed. Jennifer Daryl Slack. New York: Peter Lang, 2003. ---. We Gotta Get Out of This Place: Popular Conservatism and Popular Culture. New York: Routledge, 1992. Hardt, Michael. “Affective Labor.” Boundary 2 26.2 (1999): 89-100. Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri. Empire. Cambridge: Harvard U P, 2000. ---. Labor of Dionysus: A Critque of the State-form. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1994. Harkin, Patricia and John Schilb, eds. Contending With Words: Composition and Rhetoric in a Postmodern Age. New York: MLA, 1991. Harris, Joseph. A Teaching Subject: Composition since 1966. Upper Saddle River. NJ: Prentice Hall, 1997. Haver, William. “Queer Research; Or, How to Practice Invention to the Brink of Intelligibility.” The Eight Technologies of Otherness. Ed. Sue Golding. London: Routledge, 1997. 277-292. Hayles, N. Katherine. “Flesh and Metal: Reconfiguring the Mindbody in Virtual Environments." Configurations 10.2 (2003): 297-320. Heath, Shirley Brice. “Work, Class and Categories: Dilemmas of Identities.” Bloom, et al. 226-242. Hikins, James W. and Kenneth S. Zagacki. "Rhetoric, Philosophy and Objectivism: An Attenuation of the Claims of the Rhetoric of Inquiry." Quarterly Journal of Speech 74 (1988): 201-28. Horner, Bruce. Terms of Work for Composition: A Materialist Critique. Albany: SUNY, 2000. ---. “Traditions and Professionalization: Reconceiving Work in Composition.” College Composition and Communication. 51 (2000): 366-398. Howard, Rebecca Moore. “Reflexivity and Agency in Rhetoric and Pedagogy.” College English 56 (1994): 348-55. Hughes, Langston. "Theme for English B." Langston Hughes: Poems. Ed. David Roessel. New York: Knopf, 1999. 207. Hundert, Edward M. Lessons from an Optical Illusion: On Nature and Nurture, Knowledge and Values.” Cambridge: Harvard U P, 1994. James, William. A Pluralistic Universe. Cambridge: Harvard U P, 1977. ---. The Meaning of Truth. Pragmatism, New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking and The Meaning of Truth, A Sequel to Pragmatism. Eds. Fredson Bowers and Ignas K. Skrupskelis. Cambridge: Harvard U P, 1978. Jameson, Fredric. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. Ithaca: Cornell U P, 1982. Jarratt, Susan and Nedra Reynolds. “The Splitting Image: Contemporary Feminisms and the Ethics of ethos.” Ethos: New Essays in Rhetorical and Critical Theory. Ed. James S. and Tita French Baumlin. Dallas: Southern Methodist U P, 1994. 37-63. Johnson, T. R. “Discipline and Pleasure: ‘Magic’ and Sound.” JAC 19.3 (1999): 431-52. ---. “On the Pleasures of Misreading: T. R. Johnson Replies to Lynn Worsham.” JAC 19.4 (1999): 721-6. ---. "School Sucks." College Composition and Communication 52 (2001): 620-650. Johnson Eilola, J. and A. C. Kimme Hea. “After Hypertext: Other Ideas.” Computers and Composition. 20.4 (2003): 415-25.
164 Jordan, June. "Declaration of an Independence." Defining Women: Social Institutions and Gender Divisions. Ed. Linda McDowell and Rosemary Pringle. Cambridge: Open U P, 1992. Kant, Immanuel. Prologomena to Any Future Metaphysics. Trans. Paul Carus. Classics of Western Philosophy. Ed. Stephen M. Cahn. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1977. 764-839. Katz, Stephen. The Epistemic Muse of Rhetoric. Carbondale: Southern Illinois U P, 1996. Kay, Jen (pseudonym). The History of Jen Kay as a Scholar." Student text. February 6, 1996. Used with permission. ---. "Malcolm X Speaks to Me." Student text. May 3, 1996. Used with permission. Kelly, Lou. “Toward Competence and Creativity in an Open Class.” Ohmann and Coley 2- 18. Knoblauch, C. H. “Rhetorical Constructions: Dialogue and Commitment.” College English 50 (1988): 125-40. Knorr-Cetina, Karlyn. “Introduction: The Micro-Sociological Challenge of Macro-Sociology: Towards a Reconstruction of Social Theory and Methodology.” Advances in Social Theory and Methodology: Towards an Integration of Micro and Macro Sociologies. Eds. K. Knorr-Cetina and A. N. Cicourel. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981. 1-47. Kusterer, Ken C. Know-how on the Job: The Important Working Knowledge of Unskilled Workers. Boulder, CO: Westview, 1978. Lakoff George, and Mark Johnson. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1980. Landow, George P. "The Rhetoric of Hypermedia: Some Rules for Authors." Hypermedia and Literary Studies. Ed. Paul Delany and George P. Landow. Cambridge: MIT P, 1991. Langer, Susanne K. Feeling and Form: A Theory of Art. New York: Scribner, 1953. Lanham, Richard. The Electronic Word: Democracy, Technology, and the Arts. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1993. Le Doeuff, Michelle. The Philosophical Imaginary. Trans. Colin Gordon. Stanford: Stanford U P, 1989. Lindemann, Erika. Rhetoric for Writing Teachers. 3rd edition. New York: Oxford U P, 1995. Lu, Min-Zhan. "Reading and Writing Difference: The problematic of Experience." Feminism and Composition. Ed. Susan Jarratt and Lynn Worsham. New York: MLA, 2000. Lu, Min-Zhan and Bruce Horner. “The Problematic of Experience: Redefining Work in Critical Ethnography and Pedagogy. College English 60 (1998): 357-77. Macherey, Pierre. “The Encounter with Spinoza.” Deleuze: A Critical Reader. Ed. Paul Patton. London: Blackwell, 1994. 59-74. Mandell, Laura. "Sample Assignment for Using the Online Bijou Gift Book." Online. June 11, 2003. < http://www.orgs.muohio.edu/anthologies/bijou/edintervene.htm> Marcuse, Herbert. "The Affirmative Character of Culture." Negations: Essays in Critical Theory. Trans. Jeremy J. Shapiro. Boston: Beacon, 1968. 88-133. Marley, Bob. "Redemption Song." Uprising. Island Music, 1982. Martin, Emily. "The Egg and the Sperm: How Science Has Constructed a Romance Based on Stereotyped Male-Female Roles. Signs: Journal of Women's Culture and Society 16.3 (1991): 455-501. Matewan. Dir. John Sayles. Cinecom, 1987. Marx, Karl. Capital. Chicago: Encyclopedia Brittanica, 1957.
165 ---. Grundrisse. Trans. Martin Nicolaus. New York: Vintage, 1973. May, Todd. "Gilles Deleuze and the Politics of Time." Man and World. 29.3 (1996): 293-304. McKenna, Andrew J. “The Law’s Delay: Cinema and Sacrifice.” Legal Studies Forum. 15.3 (1991): 199-211. August 9, 2003.
166 Reddy, Michael J. "The Conduit Metaphor: A Case of Frame Conflict in Our Language about Language." Metaphor and Thought. Ed. Andrew Ortony. Cambridge: Cambridge U P, 1986. 164-201. Reich, Robert. The Work of Nations: Preparing Ourselves for 21st Century Capitalism. New York: Vintage, 1992. Resnick, Mitchel. Termites, Turtles, and Traffic Jams. Boston: Bradford, 1997. Ricoeur, Paul. Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation. Trans. Dennis Savage. New Haven: Yale U P, 1970. Rogin, Michael. Ronald Reagan The Movie. Berkeley: U of California P, 1988. Rose, Nikolas. Inventing Ourselves: Identity, Power, Personhood. New York: Cambridge U P, 1996. Rose, Stephen. The Making of Memory: From Molecules to Mind. New York: Anchor, 1993. Rose, Wendy. Going to War with All My Relations. Flagstaff, AZ: Northland, 1993. Rowbotham, Sheila. Woman's Consciousness, Man's World. New York: Penguin, 1973. Royer, Daniel J. “New Challenges to Epistemic Rhetoric.” Rhetoric Review 9 (1991): 282-297. Rubin, Gayle. "The Traffic in Women: Notes on the 'Political Economy' of Sex." The Second Wave: A Reader in Feminist History. Ed. Linda Nicholson. New York: Routledge, 1997. Sanders, Barry. Sudden Glory: Laughter as Subversive History. Boston: Beacon, 1995. Sayers, Sean. Reading and Reason: Dialectic and the Theory of Knowledge. New York: Basil Blackwell, 1985. Sidorkin, Alexander J. “The Labor of Learning.” Educational Theory. 51.1 (2001): 91-108. Smith, Barry and Christopher Welty. "Ontology: Toward a New Synthesis." Proceedings from the Second Annual Conference on Formal Ontology and Information Systems. Ogonquit, ME: ACM, 2001. iii-ix. Smith, Dorothy E. The Everyday World as Problematic: A Feminist Sociology. Boston: Northeaster U P, 1987. Soliday, Mary. "Translating Self and Differences through Literacy Narrative." College English 56 (1994): 511-26. Sonnheim, Jon. "Samuel Taylor Coleridge's 'Work Without Hope.'" June 11, 2003. June 15, 2003
167 Toulmin, Stephen. “The Inwardness of Mental Life.” Online. The Ryerson Lecture. April 30, 1979. University of Chicago. August 9, 2003.
168