Particle, Wave, Field

I’ve returned to Virginia after nine days in Michigan for Is.’s high school graduation ceremony and party, and so I am settling in a tad road weary, searching for how to pick up where I left off last Tuesday: particle, wave, field; Wendell Berry’s poem, “IX;” and underlying conditions.

In graduate school, the long shadow of Richard Young, Alton Becker, and Kenneth Pike’s Rhetoric: Discovery and Change (1970) seemed to me to be in its twilight, its influence relaxing as social-epistemic approaches to teaching/leaning rhetoric and writing took greater hold. Given that Young, Becker, and Pike advocated for their tagmemic approach as inventive and heuristic, a careful and generative work with tagmemes as the smallest discernible “units in context” for composing, it isn’t quite right to say that they belonged to a different pedagogical model altogether. Rather, tagmemics were prone to use as a structuralist analytic, which, in turn, bordered on strict logical operations. Another way to frame this would be to pose different emphases for the phrase “units in context,” noting that, for some, the “units” carried far greater importance for many years, while context gradually ascended, boosted by the internet, globalization, pop culture, and technological accessories to multimodality.

I think I remember copies of Rhetoric: Discovery and Change (1970) lying around the graduate student offices I once shared in Cockefair Hall at UMKC and HB Crouse at Syracuse. At UMKC, so too were there stacks of Peter Elbow’s Writing Without Teachers (1973), so many in fact that I remember thinking that whatever it contained, it was a book few sought out, held onto, carried home, etc. In addition to the amplifiers of contextualism listed in the previous paragraph, so too was this moment as I experienced it–the late 1990s and early 2000s–punctuated with rhetorical genre studies, post-structuralism, cultural studies, and a blend of close reading, classics imitation, and high-brow critical essayism. As such, copies of Bizzell and Herzberg’s Negotiating Difference (1995) and Bartholomae and Petrosky’s Ways of Reading (3rd Ed., 1993). This is more retrospective than I planned to share in this post, and yet this backdrop returns me to the concern for what else stalled, or went dormant, when tagmemics lapsed. The fade-out of tagmemics might, for example, pair with Paul Butler’s account (2008) of how style dried up or with Susan Peck Macdonald’s article (2007) about the gradual decline of “language” in CCCC programs.

And this links up with a hypothesis, or what is perhaps lying lower than a hypothesis as a mere hunch I’d like to follow: with the fade-out of tagmemics, so too did the field leave behind the small. Or maybe it’s that the small fanned out, spilled in other ways to technical communicators tracking eye movements or keystrokes, archival researchers sifting and whiffing for dust, or narrative crumb-catchers revaluing experiential minutiae in anecdotes and vignettes. The discursive-small, tagmemics, faded, but other smalls held on for a few beats here and there and there, too. Extending from this, the smallest of the small may have slipped beneath notice, the rarer provenance of copy editors or technical stylists, linguist-compositionist hybrids, or old-headed grammarians quietly beholden to parts of speech-lit lanterns for writing by. And with contextualism, which is burdensome and slow when dwelling with the small, middle and larger-scale units spring up. Contextualism (done justice) itself carries with it details abundant to a new order of magnitude, and this is context’s double-edged quality: always too much, and never enough.

Young, Becker, and Pike’s wave, particle, and field constructed “field” as the biggest of the three tiny components responsible for materializing–in expressive motion–the utterance. But it’s not clear to me that this variation on field shares its cornerstones with the field conjured under the label of rhetoric and composition, much less as Wendell Berry observed fields during his 1979 visit to Peru. Though I really should be going back again and studying this more closely, I’ll go ahead with my clouded understanding to say that with wave and particle, field is more like a traversable plane, contingent, stable-for-now and knowable as such, with the potential for circulation. Field, for rhetoric and composition, instead names loosely assembled activities and infrastructure that endure in service of continuing inquiry and interconnection. They’re not quite synonymous, though by pairing them, their explanatory power enjoys a multiplier. Next, I’ll see if I can explore in tandem that poem I keep mentioning from Wendell Berry, “IX,” and the idea of underlying conditions.

Thrash Old Concepts

Didn’t have time enough in Indianapolis to attend any of the sessions about threshold concepts, but I did hear about them in hallway and dinner conversations. I’d encountered the phrase before in this article, but at #4c14, it seemed like an awful lot was coming up threshold concepts, seemed like there’s a growing gusto for this sort of thing. Threshold concepts as their own sort of threshold. The oncoming threshold concept turn.

Home-ish now from the convention, tonight I was reading to Is. before bed, near the end of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, a book we’ve been chipping away at for, I don’t know, a month or more, every other bedtime. Harry and Hermione are advancing “Through the Trapdoor” (the 16th chapter’s title), in front of them a dead troll:

“I’m glad we didn’t have to fight that one,” Harry whispered as they stepped carefully over one of its massive legs. “Come on, I can’t breathe.”

He pulled open the next door, both of them hardly daring to look at what came next–but there was nothing very frightening in here, just a table with seven differently shaped bottles standing on it in a line.

“Snape’s,” said Harry. “What do we have to do?”

They stepped over the threshold, and immediately a fire sprang up behind them in the doorway. It wasn’t ordinary fire either; it was purple. At the same instant, black flames shot up in the doorway leading onward. They were trapped. (285)

Is. interrupted here to ask, “What’s a threshold?” And, attempting with a weak shrug to reach across connotations both referring to door trim and limits, I said, “It’s something like an edge, a boundary.”

That thresholds trap, enclose, bound, constrain, pen up, etc. and that they simultaneously, by doing so, protect, focus, and intensify a domain is at least part of their paradox. And I should be clear that I look forward to learning more about this idea emerging in service of disciplinary bona fides. But I’m also wondering where the idea (toward common disciplinary articulations) maps onto or butts up against rhetoric, which seems especially with invention and memory to by constituted by a kind of thresholding–if we can verb TC for a second–the re-articulations that themselves ignite and also extinguish flamewalls like the ones sandwiching poor Harry and Hermione in Rowling’s narrative telos.

Just wondering now which narrative telos “our” threshold concepts will flamewall in and flamewall out. Wondering how (im)permeable and how burning-hot the flamewalls will become and how much will char in their proximity.

New Echo, New Narcissus

Kopelson writes,

Yet, as composition studies is distinct in its penchant for ‘borrowing,’
we are also, in my opinion, unrivaled in our proclivity for
self-examination. I am not arguing that this is an unimportant
activity, but only that the costs are indeed high when self-scrutiny comes
at the expense of taking up other critical concerns and of making other,
more innovative and far-reaching forms of knowledge (775).

This appears in the final section of the essay, the part titled "Conclusion:
Banishing Echo and Narcissus." Here, Kopelson takes exception with the
field’s self-reflexivity, the growing heap of self-interested and self-absorbed
assessments of where we are or where we are heading. There is an
unidentified villain here, and I wondered as I read whether Kopelson has any
favorite ‘misses’, accounts that get it terribly wrong or that are built up on
marsh-lands of mushy data.

Reading this section and the quotation above in particular, I had the
sense that Kopelson wasn’t as interested in "banishing" Echo and Narcissus
as in giving them overhauls, in renewing them, even in teaching them how to
resonate
and reflect less recklessly. In other words, what is
wrong with many self-reflexive disciplinary accounts (or "discipliniographies"
to lift and bend a term Maureen Daly Goggin introduces in Authoring a
Discipline
) is that they succumb to a localist impulse. That
is, they un-self-conciously extrapolate from local experience and anecdotal
evidence onto the field at large, projecting some local knowledge onto the
expansive abstraction that is the discipline (however we imagine it to be).
The localist impulse can take many different shapes; often it is akin to reading
patterns through the course of an individual career (i.e., "in my thirty years
at Whatsittoyou U.") or by cherry-picking from an exceedingly thin selection of
data (titles of conference presentations or tables of contents for teacher
training manuals). We all do this to some extent–making sense of the field at
large through our local, immediate experiences, but it is dangerous to arrive at
conclusions about the field (or world) at-large solely by examining one’s own
neighborhood.

What I’m getting at is that I don’t have any beef with the disciplinary
practice of self-examination. Perhaps there are more than a handful of
fields in the academy that would benefit from more of it. I hold history (the calling of others who’ve navigated this canyon) and
reflection in high regard (perhaps not to the ill-fated extremes of Echo and
Narcissus). Resonanceresonanceresonance and reflection are valuable, especially for newcomers,
for the "new converts" Kopelson mentions. But they will not be successful–or
very useful–until they get beyond that localist impulse, until they involve
earnest field-wide data collections and collaboratively built databases. I
don’t know how well this matches with Kopelson’s "innovative and far-reaching
forms of knowledge," but it is increasingly where my own interests lie.
If those far-reaching forms of knowledge included disciplinary data (even simple
stuff, like how many programs offer undergraduate writing majors), they could
generate insights about disciplinarity. In the meantime those full-view
insights will continue to elude us as long as we leap from local knowledge to
widespread pattern, without addressing sufficiently the intermediary scales.

Kopelson, Karen. “Sp(l)itting
Images; or, Back to the Future of (Rhetoric and?) Composition.” CCC 59.4
(2008): 750-780. [Carnival]

Spitting Images

A passing tribute to having wrapped up Dan Roam’s
The Back of the Napkin
last
night, I figured why not throw down a few images in the spirit of keeping things
carnivalesque. Roam is a marker-carrying whiteboarder whose core premise is that
we spark insights into complex problems by treating them to a simplified and
illustrated version. I doubt that I have played strictly by the heuristics
he introduces in the book; nevertheless, I do find some of the stark
oversimplifications in these first four images helpful for thinking through some
of what Kopelson sets up in the article.

Continue reading →

Inversion and Dissolution

Obviously I am interested Kopelson’s revisitation of ages old and still going
tensions for the field of rhetoric and composition. The margins of my copy
bear out busy strings of alternating yesses and questions; I suppose I’ll focus
this entry on a couple of the questions.

Any time I come across suggestions of the field’s dissolution, I want to go
as directly as I can to the evidence. What are the forms of evidence
supporting this or that impression that the field is gradually changing toward
some state of (presumably undesirable, even disastrous) dissolution? Also:
What idyllic disciplinary model is lurking as the milk and honey benchmark
against which judgments of dissolution are alleged? I mean that the
suggestion of a trend toward dissolution conjures up an idealized state of the
discipline. From when? Where? And just how abstract is it? (I have
monkeyed with this idea in the diss, but also in some of the material on the
side that won’t make it into the diss, like the stuff on the
Golden Age).

Kopelson puts it like this in one spot:

But whatever your particular vision of the divide [between theory and
practice], and wherever you lay blame (or praise) for it–with the elitist,
ponderous, past-dwelling rhetoricians, or the professionalizing, pragmatic,
present-dwelling compositionists–there is evidence that the seeds of
dissolution are indeed being sown. (770)

About the evidence: In this article, it amounts to (x? number) of
survey responses from graduate students at two institutions–programs in the
Consortium, I would
guess, and a sampling of sources that have dealt more or less directly in
reflections upon or critiques of disciplinarity: Dobrin, Spellmeyer, North,
Swearingen, Mulderig, among others. Perhaps this is adequate for establishing
dissolution, perhaps not. This is not to cast doubts on Kopelson’s
evidence (it is, after all, reflective of pocketed perceptions of dissolution),
as much as it is to say that the change is more of situated (daresay anecdotal?)
degree than of field-wide kind. And so I wonder how new this perceived sowing of
"the seeds of dissolution" is, and just what does it put at risk? Following this
evidence–surveys and selected sources, the next line carries the claim further:
"the field of rhetoric and composition is, in the most extreme cases, gradually
evacuating itself of its first term (if not explicitly in name, then implicitly
in institutional practice) or, in other cases, is undergoing an interesting
inversion of its titular terms" (770). The possibility of evacuation and
inversion calls to mind the necessary ratios between theory and practice. Is the
target ratio 50:50? Might be, depending on whether we are talking topical focus
(i.e., research motivated by theory or practice) or activity itself (i.e., time
spent theorizing versus time spent teaching). For graduate students, of
course, these ratios vary, too. In our program, we have fellowships
designed to relieve students of their teaching appointment so that they might
devote greater time and energy to reading and writing (if executed well, the
ratio becomes 100:0). But there are also program-level constraints on these
ratios, right? Some places prefer a 70:30 split. Others, 80:20.
We do not always determine them independently, nor are they constant over the
arc of an appointment (through a graduate program of study or otherwise).

Kopelson, Karen. “Sp(l)itting
Images; or, Back to the Future of (Rhetoric and?) Composition.” CCC 59.4
(2008): 750-780. [Carnival]

Writing Feverlets*

Curious about her critique of Derrida’s Archive Fever, I picked up a
copy of Carolyn Steedman’s Dust: The Archive and Cultural History from
Bird Library, recalling it from another patron who had checked it out (v. sorry
about that). I deal briefly with AF in Chapter Three. Steedman
makes the point that AF is less about archives than about Derrida’s
concern for the slippage of origins (a theme in his other work) and the
inseparability of psychoanalysis from Freud (and also Judaism). She
writes, "The Foreword [to AF] carried the main argument, about Freud’s
Jewish-ness, and the contribution of Jewish thought to the idea of the archive,
via psycho-analysis" (7). Basically, Steedman is suspicious of Derrida’s
characterization of the fever (as a frenzied pursuit of origins which do not
properly exist). She complains that the concept of the fever is degraded in
translation from Mal d’Archive, and then she enthusiastically claims the
sickness Derrida mocks: "Archive fever, indeed? I can tell you all about
Archive Fever!" (17). Dust undertakes this "all about-ness" at fever’s pitch;
Steedman, all the while, works to correct (or tune, at the very least) Derrida’s
glancing consideration of the archive left behind in his treatment of other
concerns (psychoanalysis, Freud, and so on).

Continue reading →

Chreod: Alignment of Set-ups

Reading more than writing today, I planned to get down notes on another run
through Porter, Sullivan, et. al.’s "Institutional Critique," (re: my own little
life raft in postmodern geography) the same for Richards’ short piece on "The
Resourcefulness of Words," from Speculative Instruments (re: wandering
resourcefulness, another spatial, and I would say networked,
consideration) , and the same, yet again, for Miller’s latest (Spring
2007) RSQ essay on automation, agency, and assessment, "What Can
Automation Tell Us about Agency?"–not for the diss., this last one, but because
I need to know more about it before responding to an email marked urgent.
Only, rather than note-making, the day turned to night, and my efforts grew more
digressive when I sought out one of Miller’s references to Latour, an article I
hadn’t heard of called, "Mixing Humans and Nonhumans Together: The Sociology of
a Door-Closer" (Social Problems 35.3). Here is Latour, er, "Jim
Johnson," at his most playful. Terrific. Coincidentally, I also have an
special place in my heart for compression
door-closers.

Continue reading →