Tuesday, September 12, 2006

Lloyd-Jones, "A View from the Center"

Lloyd-Jones, Richard. "A View from the Center." CCC 29.1 (1978): 24-29.

"A View from the Center" was delivered by Lloyd-Jones as the first annual chairs address at the 1976 CCCC in Kansas City. Lloyd-Jones attempts both to characterize the field's status and assert its legitimacy while also accounting for who we are. He begins by referring to a commitment to language as the primary trait of composition studies. From there, he sets up and knocks down a series of metaphors more or less suitable for describing the deep structure of composition studies: political, foundational (keeping with the conference's theme, "What's REALLY basic?"), architectural, and anatomical/skeletal.

Resonant with his title, the model of centrality Lloyd-Jones chooses is one of the rural telephone operator, Mrs. Peterson who is, without being celebrated for it, highly connected and also highly knowledgeable about the inner workings--discourses, relationships, activities--of the locale. To run with the comparison just a bit, the invocation of Mrs. Peterson could be framed as the following question tied to rhetoric, expertise/authority/legitimacy/respectability and involvement: how will compositionists perform their centrality, both in the academy and beyond?

Other points:

• In his discussion of metaphor, Lloyd-Jones makes use of tenor and vehicle as helper terms to account for the trope of metaphor. These echo I.A. Richards in The Philosophy of Rhetoric.
• Lloyd-Jones is overt in his skepticism of computers and "deductive electronic gadgets" in what he calls an "age of quantification."
• Without using a vocabulary of networks, this is a talk arguing for composition's centrality, the role of compositionists as well-connected language mavens and also as "negotiators, explainers, and referees" (50). A high degree of connection is preferable; without it, we "deserve our present basic position, that is, our traditional place in the damp cellar of the house of the intellect" (50).
• In his discussion of differing views on the deep structure of the field (the best metaphor, even), Lloyd-Jones winds up preferring mutability over rigidity.
• Lloyd-Jones also mentions "keeping up" and the problems involved with knowing everything (enough) when doing work across the disciplines.
• There is an unusual religious subtext here, and it's especially evident at the end with the line, "Keep the Faith, Babies." Um?

"In an age of quantification, allegiance to the metaphor is subversive, because it upsets the deductive electronic gadgets we have elected to be our masters" (45).

"The metaphor, with its dogged insistence on outright nonsense, simply puts the machine to sleep. Only a human mind can find wisdom in absurdity, and that is how we know we are not machines" (45).

"Metaphor crafting is the ethical badge of membership in our guild" (46).

"We know, as the computer does not, that if we say our love is a rose, we are not just confessing to some botanical perversion" (46).

"One metaphor lies, but several in concert lead" (47).

"We are of more than one mind about what really is the deep structure [of the field]" (48).

"I don't want to see the view from the center to be the view along a political line, but rather the view from the middle of the universe" (49).

"Anyway, we do not expect to know everything; we want to master the spaces between everything" (49).

"Keeping up with new work is getting harder all of the time" (50).

"But if we do not try to be in the center of all knowledge, to report the view from the center of how disciplines interact, we deserve our present basic position, that is, our traditional place in the damp cellar of the house of the intellect" (50).

Posted by Derek Mueller at September 12, 2006 12:50 PM to Writing Technologies