The roles critical theory and cultural studies may play in writing instruction

Both methods challenge, enforce, put in play, consider “critique” as it relates to writing

We know that we are interested in critique b/c this is the basis of most of

• our writing
• our students’ writing

And because we teach students to

• be aware
• question practices and assumptions
• challenge dominant structures
• argue for and against various things/moments/texts/positions

We show problematic ideas, representations, racial, gendered, class positions, and so on. We show these problems through readings of texts (films, essays, stories, poems, TV shows, etc). We base most of our writing on this “showing.” We make others aware of “something” through writing.

But is that practice beyond its own methodology? I.e, how do this week’s readings enforce or challenge such teaching? How do they try and make us “aware” of issues related to critique and our pedagogical approaches to critique? How are they trying to make us aware of what might be, at times, missing from our usage of critique?
Response to issues/problems/culture

• Latour’s gathering
• Berlin’s ideology
• Trimbur’s circulation
• Vitanza’s rhetoric as critique

Terms of theory Vitanza introduces as writing styles:

• hyperbole - exaggeration
• metalepsis - one thing referenced by something else
• catachresis - saying the wrong thing/improper usage of word or term
• metaphor
• dissoi logoi - arguing both sides/or working with contrasts, contradictions

See Silva Rhetoricae for these and other terms

Critique:

• Out of steam
• Ideological
• Circulation of materiality - Trimbur (214) probelmatize within the process of production (as opposed to being critical) in order to later intervene (215). What are all the “things” that go into a specific issue/problem/piece of writing (here we hear a bit of Latour)
• Language - Berlin wants attention to language as the ways students mediate power (race, class, gender). Vitanza wants a rhetorical language that exposes and upsets, makes fun of, is not serious all the time
• Takes itself to seriously (Latour, Vitanza) or not serious enough (Berlin) in student writing?

What are the readings complicating regarding the teaching of writing? Assignment creation?

To pose an assignment as part of a Thing, or circulation, then, means you have to think of the Whole, not part.

This means you have to think of the class, not the one assignment. Our challenge now is to be seeing the class as a whole, not as scattered pieces.

Let’s start in that direction: Class goals. Context. Book. Day to day.

Particularly if you are imagining argument or critique as central to the work you will do.

Rather than pro/con, controversial issue, “something of importance,” or related assignment that does not get at what this week’s readings propose, construct the assignment(s) within the larger course based on the whole. In other words, don’t teach the matter of fact assignment (Latour). Instead, can you teach to write matters of concern (Latour)?

First step: what would you read? (invention - see Walker, Corder)

Second step: what does that reading allow students to do? (rhetoric - see Vitanza, Brodkey, Davis, Ray, Barthes)

Third step: what are the larger issues, “gatherings,” gestures, moves, material conditions you want students to engage with and express?

Fourth step: how would students go about researching or exploring the issue/problem/idea/gesture (Johnson) or use the details of their research (Brooke) to remake, rethink, redo (Harris) and rethink assumptions (Skorczewski) in an inventive way (Ulmer, Bishop) where language drives the work (Vitanza, Hartwell, Williams)?

What would be gathered or assembled or added in such research (Latour)?

How might the course/assignment/writing be intertextual/inter-connected (Vitanza)?

Draw from this week and previous weeks.

Trimbur
Production, circulation – knowing the other areas of production
189 Material conditions of producing writing
190and issue of DELIVERY – getting writing somewhere
191 its redefinition
193 the ways different positions on this matter (like Elbow vs Bartholomae) may be similar =
student masters ideas and delivers them (teacher parental authority who authorizes delivery)
and the class is a domestic space (contrast with Brooke or Johnson)
194 much of this has to do with how domestic space (classroom) is the only space for writing
195 one problem is what we mean by “real world” – as if class is not a real world
198 and students as readers and consumers of ideas (spectators)
199 which is only one area of the circulation process
200 interest in active audience
201 agency – Trimbur is questioning agency in the production of meaning (only audience, only producer of product), a place to think more about how meaning is produced – what if all at once are agents?
Stuart Hall’s point (noted on 202) is that meaning is produced by both the instigator of the message, and the receiver – as in television programs, or other modes of popular culture
203 – the model is a circuit – media – receiver – back to media
or a circle
203-204 though we hear more about how it’s not exactly a circle but relations – meanings depend on how they circulate, how they are exchanged, how they are capitalized (which is not just economic)
206 same idea via Marx
and how the idea is metaphorical – what is it that circulates?
207 sense of what is valuable – what Marx calls exchange value – Trimbur is getting at a writing issue – writing as not just for use value but for exchanges
208 value of commodity
210 here the connection is made to understanding a text in relations to labor power, but also prevailing social relations (a point I’d like to expand)
one way to think of these points regarding exchange and commodity and value is to ask how a piece of writing might function along Sommers’ lines (either to revamp or amend to her revision issues)
212 rethink statement: to change how WRITING circulates requires thinking about means of production (where writing occurs, contexts, situations, in relation to what forces, etc). Not just : writing occurs.
215 this is about how we problematize expertise (what we know and how we come to know it)
217 to allow every answer to produce “further troubles”

Vitanza

41-2 writing as meta discipline
42 theory compatible w/writing
44 provoking over convincing
45 methodology (at bottom) is rhetoric of style
47 grammar
48 whatever we have said to now – little changes b/c we have not reclaimed Sophists project
49 part of problem is consensus (in grammar, and in what we do – categories)

we need dissension - paralogy

critique is epidictic - consensus, what we already agree on

50 what is uncontrollable in language, thought, and grammar – ambiguity is always the norm

50 the truly creative principle in language

otherwise what we are really talking about is control - of creativity and the imagination
52 paralogism – the marginal, not in agreement

it will be a rhetorical/critical attitude known as paralogism

53 a rhetoric based on intertextuality - comedic pluarlistic intertextual

does not follow persuasion an identification

from Foucault: parodic – pushing accepted commonplaces
dissociation of identity/stable self – the one true name (writing, student, teacher, etc)
54 third opposed to knowledge as absolute

Vitanza proposing stylistics as opposed to “pure rhetoric” whose sole purpose is persuasion - if all we have is persuasion, we have impoverished rhetoric

55 need of terms that create ambiguities (not jus reveal them)
what does it look like? Curative fiction.
56 like Burroughs an alternative practices of citation (instead of as proof, citation is a form of writing).

use of montage and quotation - copyright is the right to copy

58 we need Lanham’s homo-rhetoricus - deeply sophistic who has been bypassed for homo-seriosus (the serious, “philosopher” critic)

59 of course, a certain kind of “traditionalism” will be suspect of all this (see Berlin: ideology)

60 bringing into realization what has been displaced

why should we care about being called “eccentric” - because this call is what will keep conversations going (rather than consensus)

this call will bring back kairos - the timeliness - the many competing contradictory voices

(my own temporal work)

and play

Latour

225 has critique run out of steam

the same old gesture (remember Ray)

226 do we go through motions without the spirit

227 feeling once obscured certainty of closed argument/ years spent dtrying to detect prejudices hidden behind appearance of objectivity

228 what is the difference b/w conspiracy and critique?

229 both appeal to hidden, powerful agents

230 critique has now been miniaturized

231 the goal is not to abolish critique but to: retest the linkages/revisit our critical equipment

* to deal with matters of concern over so called matters of fact

232 matters of fact have been good for DEBUNKING

matters of concern don’t debunk but PROTECT and CARE

* is it possible to write in a matter of concern way? A QUESTION FOR OUR PEDAGOGY

233 a thing is an object out there/and issue is in there, it is a gathering/

what is it to talk about objects as a thing

234 the object made into a thing/thing into object/ it takes a lot of things to gather into an object

236 things have become Things again, objects have reentered the arena, the Thing, in which they have to be gathered first in order to exist later as what stands apart

237 matters of fact are thrown into doubt when we see teh complex, historically situated richly diverse matters of concern

why can’t we bring out the stubbornness, the same solid realism by bringing out the webby, thingy matters of concern?

the role of the critic has been to show what naive believers are doing with objects is a projection of their wishes

238 that’s why critique feels so good

239 you are always right!

240 but! None of us would like to see our cherished objects treated so (whether they be educational, cultural): here you have all our past readings about students not wanting to be told education or democracy or capitalism is bad for them, oppresses them, etc.

241 we explain objects we don’t like by treating them as fetish (critique)

243 a third position (after fact, fairy): FAIR (see Vitanza for third)

are you not tired of explanations? / but the goal is not to dismantle critical weapons

244 should note that matters of fact are unrealistic attempts to define what it is to work with things

245 matters of fact are a POOR PROXY OF EXPERIENCE (think pro/con or simplistic argument here)

instead, we need to think in terms of societies, association (Social)

246 the solution: the multifarious inquiry launched with many disciplinary tools to detect how many participants are gathered in a thing (networks, in other words)

the critic, then, is not the one who debunks but the one who assembles

not away from gathering, but toward it: the Thing

247 all matters of fact require matters of concern

248 critique needs more, not less, all inquiry needs to be things, to assemble and gather

Berlin

477 rhetoric is always ideological

478 social epistemic - aware of its own ideological stand

choices in the economic social political and cultural are thus always based on discursive practices that are interpretations not transcriptions of a reality

ideology - transmitted through language and always at the center of conflict

479 ideology interpellates the subject in a manner that determines what is real

interpellation is implicated in power relationships

480 cognitive rhetoric -where it is at basis of current traditional - intends to produce managerial class (workers, i.e. these are the skills you will need when you graduate)

feeling that by observing writers, one can understand entire rhetorical context

481 works w/task environment, writer’s memory, writing processes in writer’s mind

planning, generating, organizing, and goal setting (see how many of your textbooks use this or similar language)

482 refutes ideological

linear, hierarchical and rational empahsized

problem solving is act of person in isolation (opposite of Latour)

483 purpose of writing is to create comodified text (USE VALUE)

484 Expressivist - democratized writing, located in individual subject

485 language awakens authentic self

liberates students from shackles of society

486 power is configuration of individual’s encounter with world/ political change comes from individual on individual’s terms

corporate sponsored thought

487 lacks political protest/ industry would like this (because of emphasis on individual)

488 social epistemic - engages the material, social, and individual with language as mediator (gathering?)

489 the ways discourse is generated - the way knowledge comes into existence

subject/ discourse community/ material conditions

490 social epistemic offers critique of political, economic and social

shows students how they have been made powerless

491 claim for classroom interdisciplinary methods - Shor is the example (can ask how predetermined result is or expected to be: SEE Katrina example)

492 Berlin, though, claims that the outcome is always unpredictable

social epistemic offers analysis of dehumanizing experiences and self critical and historicized accounts