Outbreaks And (Re)Containments: On the Politics of Writing
Donald Morton
| Revision History | ||
|---|---|---|
| • February 1992 | Newspaper: Funded by Syracuse University students. | |
| The Alternative Orange: Vol. 1 No. 4 (pp. 9,13-14) | ||
| • August 27, 2000 | Webpage:  . | |
| DocBook XML (DocBk XML V3.1.3) from original. | ||
Susan Miller, Textual Carnivals: The Politics of Composition, Southern Illinois University Press
In today’s rapidly changing academic/intellectual environment, Textual Carnivals is a helpful intervention into the program of re-situating “composition” in relation not only to “literature” (its “complement” in the English studies disciplinary program), but more importantly to the broad shift in humanistic inquiry which is now under way. This shift — by no means a homogeneous or unified movement, but one characterized, as Miller indicates, by “struggle” — is today taking two broad directions : on the one hand, it is being drawn in the direction of the new “Textual Studies” by those under the strong influence of (post)structuralism, and, on the other hand, in the direction of “Cultural Studies” by those who are wary of the political/ social/economic implications of the other camp’s overtextualizing of cultural phenomena.
In spite of the prominence given to textuality in its title, Textual Carnivals reveals its alliance with the second group in numerous ways: explicitly in the many cautionary remarks the author makes about those forms of cultural analysis and explanation which fail to look beyond what might be called “textual operations”; and implicitly in the notable avoidance of any highly pronounced reliance (although terms like “logocentrism” and “presence” figure in her inquiry) on Derrideanism — and this, in a book with the avowed aim of reunderstanding the cultural significance of Writing. The effectiveness of Miller’s book, then, is in the strong effort not merely to connect the fate of “composition” — relegated by common sense to a merely ancillary role in academic/intellectual practices — to these larger developments, but also to pressure herself and her colleagues in composition into considering how pedagogues/theorists of composition can intervene in these larger struggles. Making connections is, Miller rightly argues, merely a “cognitive” activity; intervention is a political one. Since in her view, all cultural activities are political, the merely “cognitive” activity of “making connections” is certainly too weak (in her language too “intransitive”) an act to produce any socially beneficial effects — it is, in other words, a mere complicity with dominant understandings. It is her goal to show that even those recent changes in composition that have been hailed as producing decisive alterations of it as a field of study are ultimately complicit with the old “oppressive” dominant narratives. In this light, Miller’s is an admirably ambitious study.
In broad terms, the book works towards its goal of reunderstanding the place of composition by re-framing recent developments in composition theory and practice, specifically by re- examining the dominant narrative that celebrates the “arrival” (finally) of composition at a state of intellectual “respectability” through the development of its “own” theory (process theory) which freed it from its supposed dependence on literary studies and gave it an “autonomy” as a “discipline” in its own right. In this narrative, there is much to celebrate : composition specialists, on this view, have acquired a new degree of “respect” from those who looked down on them before, and they have somewhat greater access to professional resources and rewards. In other words, the formation of composition as a “self-grounding” discipline has enabled the “professionalization” of its practictioners. In itself, however, the goal of mere professionalization produces new limitations. Thus Miller’s counter-narrative calls attention to those implications of process theory which its promoters have overlooked in their eagerness to celebrate the “new” discipline and the “new” professionalism and the “new” institutional rewards that have accompanied the changes. For instance, Miller argues that focussing on writing as an activity purported to be “internal to itself, ” one without “consequences, ” process theory has in fact reinforced that mere cognitivism which, while it does connect the various moments of the writing “process” to each other, nevertheless fails to connect the student’s activities as a writer and the teacher’s activities as a teacher of writing with larger social questions. In other words, instead of the “pretheoretical” (closural) skills-acquisition model of composition teaching and learning, there arose the “theoretical ” (more open) process model of composition teaching and learning, which however brought its own closures. It may be “good” for the student and the teacher of composition to move away from “intransitivity” towards the “transitivity” enabled by process theory: but what, Miller asks, are these students going to be “transitive” about? In other words, for what goals are students being “mobilized”? In the spirit of (post)modern critique of the composition discipline and its theorists, Miller’s counter-move problematizes and politicizes the very concept of “autonomy” itself, denying that, except at an ideological cost that has to be investigated, a discipline can be established in such a way that cuts it off from implication with its “outside” — that is, with its historical/political/economic/... . context.
In the body of her book, Miller examines the difference between the “traditional” understanding of composition (as a basic-skills-level, even “remedial,” adjunct of “literary studies”) and the “new” understanding of composition as an “autonomous” discipline (made possible by process theory), using what might be called the discourse of “knowledge” (“tradition,” “discipline,” etc.). In the last section of the book, she transcribes this binary into the discourse of politics/power. Her conclusion is that the “traditional” understanding of composition constitutes a “liberal” understanding (“liberal” in the sense that what those in composition should seek, according to this view, is “reciprocity” or “parity” with “literature”) while the understanding of composition as an “autonomous discipline” may be understood — in the political terms made familiar by feminism, for instance — as a form of “separatism” (in the sense that those involved, believing such parity within the original system is impossible, seek a “different” space). Her move then is to problematize the concept of “separatism” itself as another version of “autonomy, ” in order to show its ideological/political implications.
Again in the (post)modern spirit, Miller makes the same point about the identity of the human person as “subject”: that the human person taken as an “autonomous” “individual” is not an objective description of the universal state of humankind but an ideological construct produced under present historical conditions — indeed one constructed to suit the needs of the power/knowledge arrangements prevailing in contemporary society . No matter how much “progress ” has been made in the composition field, Miller argues that in the current dominant practice, the student-subject is still “imagined to be (and in participating in the course is generally required to be) a presexual, preeconomic, prepolitical person” (87).
It is here that Miller’s contribution comes into sharpest focus: she is concerned not so much with “textuality” and “discursivity” as with the production of subjectivities. Understood in these terms, Textual Carnivals can be seen as raising the prime pedagogical question (one that is routinely overlook, taken for granted, suppressed in the American academy generally): What kind of student do we aim to produce anyway? Miller does composition teaching a great service by rejecting the thoughtless acceptance of both the old “traditionalism” and the new “technicalism” of composition studies and by focussing attention on the question of what kind of students teachers want to help produce, recognizing that this “production” is not a “free” act of “creation” but must be undertaken under the specific historical conditions of late twentieth century culture. By pressing this question, Miller’s book productively pressures the “new” common sense of what she argues is the newly established discipline of composition and simultaneously pressures the kind of subject-position it will provide for students. In Miller’s view, the student must move beyond being the traditional composition curriculum’s passive acquirer of skills; but the student must also move beyond being only the “transitive” subject enabled by process theory to being a subject with something to be “transitive” about: in other words, the student/subject must be aware of the politics of her situatedness along the axes of class/race/gender . . . It is Miller’s kind of thoughtfulness about pedagogy that appears to be needed to raise the current debates about “politics” and “relevance” in the composition curriculum from the level of “gossip” and “petty squabbles” to the level of intellectual significance. The recent battle over Freshman English at the University of Texas, widely reported in the media, is a case in point (see Mangan, “Battle Rages”).
Determining how interventionary Textual Carnivals is — in other words, just how much political pressure it finally manages to put on (either the old or the new) common sense about composition — requires further articulation of the differences between Textual Studies and Cultural Studies, of the distinct forms of the latter, and the kinds of politics promoted by each. As it has developed in the American academy, Textual Studies basically defines “politics” as disrupting stable systems of conceptualization (that which is acknowledged to be “meaningful” and “reasonable”) by “delaying” the connection of the signifier to the signified (see Zavarzadeh and Morton, Theory [Un]Limited, chapter 2). This is the discursive politics of “dissemination,” which disrupts the easy trafficking of meaning in culture. One might further note that it is a significatory politics in which, as Derrida proposes in “difference,” “whoever loses wins and... one loses and wins on every turn” (Derrida, Margins of Philosophy, 20). By contrast, Cultural Studies, although it takes signification and textualization into account, focuses ultimately — as Miller does in this book — on the production and maintenance of subjectivities and understands “politics” not simply in terms of “discourses” but also in terms of access to power/knowledge/resources. This understanding of culture recognizes, that alongside “disseminatory play,” there are in fact winners and losers in politics.
However, matters must be elaborated further, since Cultural Studies itself diverges strongly today into two different branches. On the one hand, there is what might be called Experiential Cultural Studies (as representatives of this branch, one may cite writers like Janice Radway, Teresa de Lauretis, E. P. Thompson, Constance Penley and John Fiske), and on the other, there is what might be called Critical Cultural Studies (Fredric Jameson, for instance). Miller’s Cultural Studies is ultimately eclectic: it oscillates between Experiential Cultural Studies, which is content to describe marginal “others” in culture, and Critical Cultural Studies, which works instead to explain the systematic procedures by which “others” get “othered” in the first place. It is this same eclecticism which, at another level, allows Miller, for instance, to use the categories of (post)modernism (“logocentrism,” “presence,” “marginality/alterity,” “desire,” “the subject,”...) unproblematically right alongside traditional social science categories (“statistical samples,” for instance) even though she tries to “narrativize” rather than “objectivize” her “social scientific” results. But (post)modern categories cannot be grafted so easily onto those of either the traditional humanities or (as is done here) onto the traditional social sciences: Miller is thus implicated in a significant theoretical evasion, which cannot be covered over by appeal to what she calls her “containing” discourses (p.179): the carnivalesque and narrativization. What Miller refers to as a rather “neutral” (because “metaphorical”) containment has significant political implications that go unexamined in her book. The principal contradictions of Textual Carnivals evolve around its simultaneous call for theory and its untheorized eclecticism, its simultaneous rejection of mere reformist pluralism and its appeal to Bakhtinian categories which have become the basis for one of the strongest lines of mere reformism and recuperated liberal pluralism in today’s “politicized” American academy (Giles Gunn’s discussion of Bakhtin in his recent book, The Theory of Culture and the Culture of Theory is exemplary of this pervasive tendency). Unfortunately, Miller’s acknowledgement (even if “blatant,” as she says, p.l) that one has to work in the (post)modern moment by constructing “fictions” does not take care of such theoretical contradictions.
One of the strengths of Miller’s book is its stress on critique as the most productive mode of inquiry at this historical moment: it is this recognition that allows her to resist proposing in a positivistic spirit an alternative “plan” for composition. However, this strength is undermined by other (non)moves: namely, the decisive difference between experiencebased “descriptive” critique and theory-based “explanatory” critique is not registered in Textual Carnivals. While it may stress “critique,” the book steadfastly refuses to exclude the “experiential” in the name of the “critical.” And by failing to do so, it leads the reader to ask — all over again — Miller’s leading question: What kind of “subjectivity” should the pedagogue work to produce, one taking a theorized “critical” position or one “expressing” its “experience”?
Perhaps the most evident mark of the Miller’s commitment to experientialism (and theoretical eclecticism) comes in the appendix, “The Status of Composition: A Survey of How Its Professionals See It.” As a method, the survey is, after all, a mark of that very empiricism which Miller appears at times to reject. She seems to deploy the survey as a kind of “phantom” social science instrument, “phantom” because it doesn’t finally have, as she says, much “statistical significance or scientific objectivity” (206). She uses it, she says, to “test [her] interpretations against the experience of my colleagues” (205). However, from this observation one might readily conclude that an explanatory Critical Cultural Studies (which Miller seems at times to practice) needs the “confirmation” of Experiential Cultural Studies: but this conclusion is only implied and never theorized in the text. In the absence of such theorization, the use of the survey method may plausibly be read as serving the (ideological) function of signaling Miller’s solidarity with others in the composition field. To be sure, such solidarity has its own politics here: after all, she is writing a critique of her colleagues from within a liberal institution.
Inasmuch as Miller has all along insisted on de-localizing her inquiry, that is, on connecting the politics of composition to the politics of society at large, it is consistent finally with her own goals to ask whether “critique” can indeed be the rigorous, coherent, and systematic ideology critique that she appears to promote, if at the same time it tries to blend—uncritically—the “experiential” with the “critical.” Failing decisively to press issues such as this, Miller’s investigation of “the politics of composition” — which does indeed open important questions for discussion — tends finally to settle down and join that already large and still growing body of writing that promotes the vague and “generic” kind of (post)modern politics encouraged by (post)structuralism (and its “undecidability”) which dominates academic and intellectual circles today.
WORKS CITED
Derrida, Jacques. Margins of Philosophy. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1982.
Gunn, Giles. The Theory of Culture and the Culture of Theory. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1987.
Mangan, Katherine 5. “Battle Rages Over Plan to Focus on Race and Gender in U. of Texas Course.” Chronicle of Higher Education, 21 Nov. 1990: A15.
Zavarzadeh, Mas’ud, and Donald Morton. Theory (Un)Limited: Writings in (Post)Modern Theory and Radical Pedagogy. (forthcoming)
