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SAYING AND SILENCE SAYING AND SILENCE Listening to Composition with Bakhtin FRANK FARMER UTAH STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS Logan, Utah ISBN 0-87421-451-3 (E-BOOK) Utah State University Press Logan, Utah 84322-7800 Copyright © 2001 Utah State University Press All rights reserved. Manufactured in the United States of America. Cover design by Barbara Yale-Read An earlier version of chapter one originally appeared in Symploké 2 (winter 1994) and was reprinted in PC Wars: Politics and Theory in the Academy, edited by Jeffrey Williams (Routledge, 1995). Chapter three is a reworking of an essay that originally appeared in Rhetoric Review 13 (spring 1995). Chapter six, with a few minor changes since, originally appeared in College Composition and Communication 49 (May 1998), © 1998 by the National Council of Teachers of English. Reprinted with permission. 050403020154321 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Farmer, Frank, 1951– Saying and silence : listening to composition with Bakhtin / Frank Farmer. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-87421-414-9 1. English language—Rhetoric—Study and teaching. 2. Bakhtin, M. M. (Mikhail Mikhailovich), 1895-1975—Views on rhetoric. 3. Report writing—Study and teaching (Higher) I. Title. PE1404 .F357 2001 808’.042’0711—dc21 00-012852 For my parents, Maggie and Roscoe Farmer CONTENTS Acknowledgments ix Introduction 1 1 “Not Theory...But a Sense of Theory”: 9 The Superaddressee and the Contexts of Eden 2 Aesopian Predicaments, Or Biting My Tongue 31 As I Write: A Defense of Rhetorical Ambiguity 3 Voice Reprised: Three Etudes for a 53 Dialogic Understanding 4 Sounding the Other Who Speaks In Me: 73 Toward a Dialogic Understanding of Imitation 5 Pictures at an Exhibition: Bakhtin, 95 Composition, and the Problem of the Outside 6 Dialogue and Critique: Bakhtin and 125 the Cultural Studies Writing Classroom Endnotes 149 Works Cited 159 Index 168 About the Author 172 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The chapters in this book were written over the span of several years and thus represent a chronicle of a sometimes orthodox, sometimes idiosyncratic engagement with the ideas of Mikhail Bakhtin. They also represent, I think, a measure of how my particular struggles with Bakhtin are both reflected in, and refracted through, the momentous shifts in our disciplinary conversation over the last decade or so. On a more personal level, these chapters may even serve to chart those occasions when I have seen fit to change my mind about some aspect or consequence of Bakhtin’s thought. Yet more than this, the chapters gathered here represent a record of the people and universities who provided me with encouragement and support. I would first like to thank the English Departments of East Carolina University and the University of Kansas, both of which extended to me the kinds of institutional assistance without which this book would not have been possible. Nor can I begin to do justice here to the editorial advice and encouragement I received from Michael Spooner, whose optimism and patience sustained this pro- ject (and its author) through those predictable, but still critical, hur- dles in its coming to print. I also wish to thank my anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful suggestions, as well as Red O’Laughlin for his valuable (and remarkably cheerful) help with all the last- minute preparations of this manuscript. Over the last several years, there have been many colleagues who generously contributed to the completion of this manuscript— whether they did so through conversations about ideas, or through comments on earlier drafts, or simply through their abiding friend- ship and enthusiasm. x SAYING AND SILENCE I would thus be remiss if I did not take this opportunity to thank Todd Goodson, David Stacey, Carol Mattingly, Bruce McComiskey, Sandy Young, Collett Dilworth, Pat Bizzaro, and Nancy Zeller. I espe- cially wish to extend my thanks to Jeffrey Williams and Lillian Robinson for some of the most politically and theoretically challeng- ing breakfast conversations I have known and to my former graduate students—Denise Machala-Woods, Tony Atkins, Deanya Lattimore, and Faydra Womble—for their collective ability to make me ques- tion my own certainties, even when they did not realize they were doing so. My thanks also to Devlyn McCreight, for his willingness to participate in the experiment that eventually became chapter two of this book. Among Bakhtinians, I owe a debt of gratitude to Jim Zappen, Michael Bernard-Donals, and Andreas Kriefall. Caryl Emerson con- tinues to amaze me with her professional generosity, and I cannot say enough about the many good turns—professional, scholarly, and otherwise—extended to me by Don Bialostosky. I am a better scholar for having had the opportunity to know, and occasionally work with, such exceptional colleagues. And for Linda, intimate outsider, without whose loving perspec- tive these words find no hearing, my deepest gratitude. Note: Unless otherwise cited by keyword or full title, references to Bakhtin’s texts use the following abbreviations: AA = Art and Answerability DI = The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays PDP = Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics RW = Rabelais and His World SG = Speech Genres & Other Late Essays TPA = Toward a Philosophy of the Act INTRODUCTION One development in recent scholarship centers upon what is often referred to as a rhetoric of silence. Not that we have just discovered such a rhetoric, for it is clear from even a cursory look at Richard Lanham’s Handlist of Rhetorical Terms that our predecessors long ago established a whole family of words to describe the power that silence could effect in situations that were clearly rhetorical. Indeed, within this family of ancient terms, we find not only the obvious, silence, used in a rather specialized way, but also the far less familiar obticentia, praecisio, reticentia, interpellatio—all of which fall under the umbrella term, aposiopesis, a rhetorical figure that attempts to capture the per- suasive effects of sudden silence. Classical rhetoricians apparently understood the strategic and dramatic purposes for which a refusal either to speak or to cease speaking might be appropriate, as evidenced in their constellation of terms for this one particular genre of silence. But contemporary investigations of a rhetoric of silence have been largely (though by no means exclusively) tied to the project of recov- ering women’s contributions to the history of rhetoric and rhetorical theory. This ought not to be especially surprising, given the status of women’s discourse throughout much of Western history and women’s long familiarity with silence as an ascribed quality of patri- archically-defined feminity. But of late, some feminist scholars have sought to reveal the communicative realities of silence, detailing, in particular, the ways silence has been creatively deployed by women rhetors and rhetoricians through the ages. Cheryl Glenn’s investigation of Anne Askew makes exactly this point. Tortured for her radical beliefs, the sixteenth-century Protestant reformist Askew developed a host of ways not to answer her brutal and cruel inquisitors. In Rhetoric Retold, Glenn argues that 2 SAYING AND SILENCE Askew occupied a familiar position in a longstanding tradition of women’s rhetorical silence, a lineage that continues today in such contemporary figures as former Texas governor Ann Richards and law professors Anita Hill and Lani Guinier, as well as former Surgeon General Jocelyn Elders—all of whom, Glenn points out, are quite accomplished in exercising silence as “a strategy of resistance” (177). Glenn wants to dispute the conventional reading of women’s silence as always (and necessarily) the consequence of oppression, as strictly the muting of voices unheard. “Silence,” Glenn insists, “is more than the negative of not being permitted to speak, of being afraid to speak; it can be a deliberative, positive choice” (176). Largely because “silencing and silence” are “rhetorical sites most often associated with women” (177), we have only begun to understand the historical and potential importance of silence as a rhetorical strategy. As Glenn knows well, there is a profound difference between silence enforced and silence freely chosen. Yet, what’s implied in her study (and others) is the possibility of a relationship that may obtain between these two modes of silence. Indeed, the history of women in rhetoric itself would suggest that some relationship must exist between enforced and chosen silences, for surely that special history is characterized again and again by this very tension. And, in fact, other feminist rhetorical studies do much to confirm this relation- ship. Julie Bokser’s examination of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, the sev- enteenth-century Spanish nun and poet, for example, points the way to understanding something of the intricacies of that relationship. In her reading of Sor Juana’s autobiographical letter, La Respuesta (The Answer), Bokser details the context that prompted an exchange between Sor Juana and the bishop of Puebla, “Sor Filotea,” a femi- nine pseudonym for Manuel Fernández de Santa Cruz y Sahagún. In the verbal guise of a fellow nun, Sor Filotea chastises Sor Juana for her “secular studies and her writing” (2) and urges her to desist from any further critiques of the church hierarchy.