David Wallace argues that any understanding of writing studies must include the conception of discourse as an embodied force with real consequences for real people. Informed in important ways by queer theory, Wallace calls to account users of dominant discourses and at the same time articulates a theory base from which to interpret "alternative rhetoric."
To examine the practice of writing from varied margins of society, Compelled to Write offers careful readings of four exemplar American writers, each of whom felt compelled within their own time and place to write in response to systemic injustices in American society.
Sarah Grimké, a privileged white woman advocating for abolition, is forced to defend her right to speak as a woman; Frederick Douglass begins his public career almost as a curiosity (the articulate ex-slave) and ends it as one of the most important rhetors in American history; Gloria Anzaldúa writes not only in multiple languages and dialects but from marginalized positions related to gender, race, class, sexual identity, and physical abled-ness; David Sedaris uses his privileged position as a middle-class white male humorist to speak unabashedly of his sexuality, his addictions, and obsessive-compulsive personality disorder.
Through these writers, Wallace explores a range of strategies that comprise alternative rhetorical practice, and demonstrates how such practice is inflected by social constraints on rhetorical agency and by how writers employ alternative discourses to resist those constraints. Grounding and personalizing Compelled to Write with rich material from his own teaching and his own experience, Wallace considers a number of implications for teachers of writing.
COMPELLED TO WRITE
Alternative Rhetoric in Theory and Practice By DAVID L. WALLACE UTAH STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2011 Utah State University Press
All right reserved. ISBN: 978-0-87421-812-1Contents
Acknowledgments......................................................................................11 Defining Alternative Rhetoric: Embracing Intersectionality and Owning Opacity.....................3Interchapter: Piano Lessons..........................................................................392 Sarah Grimké: Breaking the Bonds of Womanhood................................................42Interchapter: Jumper Cables and Double Consciousness as a Habit of Mind..............................673 Frederick Douglass: Taking an Ell to Claim Humanity...............................................72Interchapter: Pickles................................................................................1154 Gloria Anzaldúa: Borderlands and Fences; Literacy and Rhetoric...............................118Interchapter: The Light of the World.................................................................1595 David Sedaris: Expanding Epideictic—A Rhetoric of Indirection...............................162Interchapter: Day Four in Paris......................................................................2026 Alternative Rhetoric and Marked Writing...........................................................205Interchapter: God Abhors You.........................................................................242References...........................................................................................244Index................................................................................................250About the Author.....................................................................................256
Chapter One
DEFINING ALTERNATIVE RHETORIC Embracing Intersectionality and Owning Opacity A central insight to keep fully present in our thinking, rather than on the periphery, is the necessity of resisting a tendency to view discourse (language in particular use) as a disembodied force within which we are inevitably, inescapably, innocently swept along. Royster, 2002
The norms by which I seek to make myself recognizable are not fully mine. Butler, 2005
Could it be that we just don't know ourselves? That the very words we use to speak ourselves to others obscure as much as they elucidate? That we emerge only in the cracks when words fail to perform as we have come to expect them to?
Could it be that we fail words by forgetting they are not/can never be disembodied but continue to exist only as we speak/write/display them? That we suffer from the illusion that when we speak we have not already been spoken?
Some of us are compelled to write because we cannot escape daily reminders that words define us as different, as other. Some of us are swept along, free to speak, write, text, sing, shout, live with invisible words that allow us to lie with the herd.
This book is about those who are compelled to write: those who don't need Jacqueline Jones Royster's reminder that words are not innocent neutral tools, those who do not need Judith Butler to tell them that words they cannot control are used to label them as freaks, queers, others—dismissible. I explore what it means to speak with cracked voices, to use words, language, and rhetoric in cries and rants, teases and taunts that refuse to accept the status quo.
But this book is for all of us, too—all of us who are willing to look at the limits of our own knowing and accept that we have responsibility for what falls outside our experience, all of us who are willing to reject the myth of objectivity and embrace our subjectivities, all of us who are willing to see language as discourse and to own the implications of that insight.
Of course, I am hardly the first to note the need for a different understanding of rhetorical agency and its implications. At least since we began reading de De Saussure, Bakhtin, Vygotsky, Foucault, and others, rhetoric and composition scholars have understood that language is not a set, value-free tool. By consequence then, neither is rhetoric. Rather both language and rhetoric are always socially, culturally, and historically situated and dependent on actual practice for their continued existence. The underlying principle here is that language and rhetoric are both constitutive in that meaning making is based on the existence of these sociocultural systems that serve as the basis for shared understanding, but also in that these systems themselves have no existence independent of actual practice. Indeed, language and rhetoric are in a very real sense themselves reconstituted with each communicative interaction.
One of our field's chief problems has been how to translate our understanding of the theoretical complexities amongst language, culture, rhetoric, and individual identity into rhetorical theory, practice, and pedagogy that moves substantively beyond the presumptions of current traditional rhetoric that language and rhetoric are largely neutral tools and that, once mastered, they can be wielded equally by all as the means to economic and other kinds of power. I bring a queer twist to this problem, proposing that the concepts of intersectionality and opacity used in queer theory can help us sort out the knotty problem of negotiating identity in rhetorical theory and pedagogical practice.
As Royster argues in the opening epigraph, the discursive nature of language and rhetoric must be at the center of any understanding of rhetoric and composition that takes postmodernism seriously, and discourse must be understood as an embodied force that has real consequences for real people. My most basic argument in this book is that defining some kinds of semiotic exchanges as alternative rhetoric can help us sort out both the ways members of some groups have been systematically marginalized by dominant discourse practices that pretend neutrality and the means those who have been so marginalized have used to challenge the discourses of power. In this regard, I begin with two critical assumptions: (1) personal identity is intimately bound up in the practice and pedagogy of rhetoric, even if that identity is not always immediately apparent to all involved, and (2) fundamental components of culture, language, and rhetoric are complicit in systemic inequities in our society in ways that have real and daily consequences for those they marginalize.
Of course, at some level, defining alternative rhetoric is dependent on understanding what it is an alternative to, and defining rhetoric is a task that has kept scholars debating for 2,500 years. Rather than reviewing that long history, I explore in the first section of this chapter more recent attempts in our field to sort out the problem of accounting for the social identity of the writer as a means of illustrating the need for alternative rhetoric as I define it. In doing so, I begin with the assumption that rhetoric becomes alternative when it engages the individual's subjectivity rather than attempting to erase it and accounts for the positioning of that subjectivity within the discourse of power that enfranchise some and marginalize others. In this sense, I argue that alternative rhetoric is a meaningful term only if it is grounded both theoretically and practically in a recognition that the effects of engaging in discourse are, to some extent, always beyond our capacity to understand and control and yet, paradoxically, that we are also responsible for those effects. This seeming contradiction is actually a generative place from which to redefine alternative rhetoric in ways that move beyond the presumption that engaging in responsible rhetorical agency requires only that one have a reasonable control of dominant discourse practices as well as the usual sense of what it means to take the kinds of moral action that usually attend those practices. However, taking advantage of this generative position requires an understanding of self that recognizes that one always stands in relationship to the discourses of power in multiple ways and that knowledge of the self and its relationships to others is always incomplete. In short, we must embrace and explore the multiple intersections of identities with the discourses of power, and we must own our opacity.
I draw the terms intersectionality and opacity from queer theory in the service of exploring how alternative rhetoric can help us move us forward in our attempts to sort out how to account for the social position of the writer and speaker and of the student and teacher of rhetoric. Intersectionality is critical to work in queer theory, which argues we must get beyond binary notions of identity. For example, Karen Kopelson (2002) argues that when we allow ourselves to be identified by a single axis of difference in our society we help perpetuate those problematic binaries (a version of the subalternity problem that Gayatri Spivak brought to our attention). Borrowing from Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw's (1993) work that illustrates how major features of identity such as gender and race are not mutually exclusive categories, queer theorists have argued for a notion of identity as multiple and operating in complex interactions that make being an Asian American different from being an Asian American woman and different still from being an Asian American lesbian.
The concept of opacity comes from queer theorist Judith Butler's 2005 Giving An Account of Oneself in which she explores the moral implications of the fact that complete self-knowledge or self-definition is not possible because we are all reliant on social norms beyond our control not only for our understanding of ourselves and our position in the world but also for the means to engage with that world in meaningful ways. Coupled with an intersectional understanding of identity, Butler's understanding of this basic opacity—this fundamental incompleteness of knowledge of both the self and the other —is the foundation for a new approach to rhetoric that seeks not to minimize or eliminate this basic incompleteness but to embrace it. Butler argues, "If we are formed in the context of relations that become partially irrecoverable to us, then that opacity seems built into our formation and follows from our status as beings who are formed in relations of dependency" (20). Inherent in Butler's opacity argument is the notion that the impossibility of complete knowledge of self, the other, or the full consequences of the values and discursive practices that make meaningful interactions possible does not make agency or moral responsibility impossible. Rather she argues that building an informed moral basis for rhetoric requires a new understanding of the basis for that responsibility: in short, I read Butler as calling for us to own this fundamental opacity both in ourselves and in others as fundamental to rhetoric that seeks to substantially account for difference and to create the possibility for morally responsible rhetorical agency.
In the body of this chapter, I explore how five principles from queer theory that feature intersectionality and opacity are critical for developing an alternative to rhetoric that sees its main job as persuading the other to one's own position. However, before I do so, I pause to explore some important attempts in our field to deal with the complexities of social identity in language and rhetoric to set a clearer basis for the need for alternative rhetoric.
EMBRACING IDENTITY: WHY WE NEED ALTERNATIVE RHETORIC
Our field has struggled to understand the implications of the social identity of the author both in our approaches to pedagogy and in our conceptions of rhetorical theory. For example, Joseph Harris has rightly argued that, too often, the primary goal of progressive pedagogy devolves into the unseating of particular social inequities. As Harris argues, it is dangerous for our field to settle for approaches to rhetoric and pedagogy that seek simply "to influence [students'] present attitudes (which strikes me as a kind of intellectual canvassing for votes)" rather than to "help them learn to deploy more powerful forms of reading and writing" (2003, 578). Certainly, we cannot substitute leftist political leanings for the more substantive work of rooting out how traditional rhetoric is complicit in the many faces of oppression. However, as Royster argues, we must also be careful to guard the tendency to assume that traditional approaches to rhetorical theory and composition pedagogy provide a fair means for all to exercise agency in our society. As Patricia Bizzell argued more than twenty years ago, we must move beyond our field's nostalgia for supposedly simpler times in which language and rhetoric were seen as neutral tools with which we equipped our students to use as they wished, to a new understanding of the relationship between rhetoric and morality that provides a more substantive basis for pedagogy (1990, 665).
In recent rhetorical theory in our field, an important aspect of the struggle to understand the implications of the social identity of the author can be seen in Sidney Dobrin's chapter in Christopher Schroeder, Helen Fox, and Patricia Bizzell's 2002 collection exploring alternative discourse. Dobrin argues that the concept of hybrid discourses makes little theoretical sense because postmodernism has taught us that all discourse is hybrid and subject to change in the process of continual reconstruction. Dobrin rightly reasons that determining what counts as "alternative" or "hybrid" is a theoretically complicated task and that we must be careful not to underestimate the power of dominant cultural practices (even those in the supposedly liberal academy) to simply swallow up and neutralize nontraditional discourses in a shallow form of multiculturalism. For my purposes, the value of Dobrin's argument is that it highlights the basic discursive function of language and rhetoric: all human interactions are complex semiotic negotiations, and we would be foolish to pretend otherwise. However, because he does not explicitly account for the operation of systemic oppression within language and rhetoric, Dobrin's argument could too easily be reduced to the position that the underlying discursive nature of language and rhetoric makes it nonsensical to call out any set of discursive practices as having problematic consequences because all language and rhetoric are by nature discursive and subject to change.
Both Dobrin's argument about theory and Harris's argument about pedagogy implicitly call out the question of whether or not it is incumbent upon those who teach rhetoric and composition to deal with the social identity of the author, particularly in the extent to which we account for how our theory and pedagogy perpetuate the discourses of power that enfranchise some and marginalize others. As is likely already apparent, I believe it is morally incumbent upon us as individuals and as a discipline to do so. As a gay man who has experienced various forms of marginalization on a daily basis, I have a vested interest in this belief. However, as a white middle- to upper-class, physically abled man from a Christian background, I have also experienced considerable privilege in educational settings, and I understand the difficulties of sorting out our privilege within the discourses of power in higher education as well as how frightening it may be to contemplate changes to the rhetorical traditions and discourse practices that many of us hold dear. Before I suggest some ways queer theory can help us understand what it means to engage in such identity negotiations, I provide some historical context for this problem by exploring three principles our field has used to deal with the problem of the social identity of the writer. The principles roughly follow the history of our field on this issue, beginning with commonsense calls to provide nonmainstream students with access to the discourses of power and moving toward calls for explicit transformation of the discourses of power.
Continues...
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