{"id":7098,"date":"2007-06-13T19:54:10","date_gmt":"2007-06-13T19:54:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.earthwidemoth.com\/blog\/2007\/06\/13\/haynes-writing\/"},"modified":"2007-06-13T19:54:10","modified_gmt":"2007-06-13T19:54:10","slug":"haynes-writing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.earthwidemoth.com\/blog\/2007\/06\/13\/haynes-writing\/","title":{"rendered":"Haynes, "Writing Offshore: The Disappearing Coastline of Composition Theory""},"content":{"rendered":"

Haynes,
\nCynthia. "Writing Offshore: The Disappearing Coastline of Composition
\nTheory." JAC<\/i> 23.4 (2003):
\n667-724.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Haynes
\ncalls for composition-theory in motion, a willingness to drift all the while
\ncognizant that "so much defies reason<\/i>" (669). If composition’s
\ntheoretical currents are akin to waters upon which we float, in much that same
\nway Haynes was when she launched from the Norwegian shore into the Artic Sea in
\nthe scene that opens the essay, argumentative writing with its commitment to
\nground\/reason is the anchor that has dragged "until it took hold among the
\nbedrock curricula of grammar and style, aims and modes, claims, grounds, and
\nwarrants" (668). Haynes sets out "dissatisfied with teaching writing that
\nis primarily argumentative writing qua<\/i> reason" (669). Invoking Crowley,
\nHaynes expresses skepticism toward the "discourse of needs" (i.e., "students
\n‘need’ to write and think in particular ways" (668d)). Composition, is, in
\neffect "rotten with reason" (668)–poisoned with a mindset in relentless pursuit
\nof "the why, the reason, the rationale" (668). Writing offshore desires the
\ndisappearing coastline while acknowledging a need for movement; "it is
\nsuggestive" (670), preferring something like Elam’s "groundless solidarity."
\nHaynes writes, "Equally charged and similarly moved<\/i>, I mean to probe the
\nground beneath teaching argument (n\u00c3\u00a9<\/font>e<\/i>
\ncritical thinking) that compels us to teach good writing<\/i> as the invention
\nof good reasons<\/i>" (670).<\/p>\n

\nUnlearning a Pedagogical Apparatus (671)
\nHaynes creates a polarity between argumentation and abstraction, preferring the
\nlatter, but not as something the belongs exclusively to the authority of the
\nteacher and not as something that stirs in smoothly with the "discourse of
\nneeds" (viz., "students need<\/i> abstraction"). That is, as we move
\naway from the shoreline of composition theory, we would move toward an "abstract<\/i>
\nhorizon" (671), shifting our relationship to ground, footing, and finitude. The
\n"pedagogical juggernaut" (Ong) composition has inherited suffers from a Ramist
\nattachment to logic and reason; teacher training (replication of the juggernaut)
\ncollapses ars<\/i> (art) and doctrina<\/i> (teaching), reducing pedagogy to
\nargumentation: "Reason is perfected in pedagogy, for pedagogy, by pedagogues"
\n(673). Haynes argues for "unbuild[ing] this pedagogical apparatus" (673), for
\nunlearning as the "defamiliarization vis-\u00c3\u00a0<\/font>-vis
\nunquestioned forms of knowledge" (673). With a Derridean willingness to "disturb
\nthe doxa<\/i> in its slumber", Haynes acknowledges the chance that she will be
\ncharged with "irresponsibility," but she is willing to bear this charge if it
\nallows her "to probe the depths of a more responsive relation to students, to
\neach other, and to each Other<\/i>" (674). <\/p>\n

The
\nGround of Reason (674)
\nHaynes "prepare[s] us to need the sea" (674), as she works at the joint between
\nargumentation and abstraction. Reason, logic, and ground are the anchors, the
\nroot system of too much composition theory; Heidegger’s turn on Being (from
\nanchor, a release toward Being as "the principle of ground itself") moves such
\nthinking offshore: "Just there, beneath the seas of [Meister] Eckhart’s
\ntheological detachment and Heidegger’s secular withdrawal, we witness the
\nthunderous breach of our whale–abstraction<\/i>" (677). But abstraction
\nrequires yet more training: "We need to hear this word, and we need to tread
\nslowly" (677) (sounds like Latour on slowciological accounts). Abstraction risks
\n"the fallacy of misplaced concreteness" (677) (i.e., going aground where
\ndeterminate meaning is built). "We cannot leap from ground to ground unless we
\nkeep moving; and we cannot build castles in the air on solid foundations" (678).
\nStill, from the withdrawal\/detachment, we drift away from "representational
\nthinking." Persistent problem: "Resting in our not-leaping poses the ultimate
\nhazard: we become so rooted in reason that our feet sink deep into the sand at
\nlow tide, and each attempt to step out and up is futile" (680).<\/p>\n

Street-Smart Writing Students (682)
\nHaynes is skeptical of calls to "connect the text and the street" because such
\ngestures tend to conjure up the flaneur as the prototypical city-goer, along
\nwith its problematic "attitude towards knowledge and its social context" and its
\n"writing safely hidden by anonymity and insignificance" (683). Here, the
\ndismissal of the flaneur feels too deliberately pursued; he never stood a
\nchance! But this particular framing of flanery, although it doesn’t account for
\nhow such an attitude might be an improvement on certain other attitudes (some of
\nthis in the flaneur’s preference for social realities as preferable to the
\nhermeneut’s disposition)…this particular framing is used to "glimpse an
\nunhappy association in whose folly we are unwittingly complicit by connecting
\n‘the text and the street’" (683). Haynes puts it bluntly: "’the street’ serves
\nas a metonymic substitution through which the old ‘bait and switch’ of
\n‘reinventing the university’ is accomplished" (683). "Street smarts" flattens
\ninto argumentation, keeping with "Hellenic male ceremonial combat" traditions,
\nin which conflict is performed in such a way that maximally manages tensions.
\nHaynes works through a series of references–T.R. Johnson’s "School Sucks," ETS
\nresearch on "Extending Intelligence," and a program called
\nReason!able<\/a><\/i> that supports argument
\nmaps–visual renderings of a text (Haynes is especially critical of this; it’s
\nnot clear that she has much tolerance for visuality, especially where technology
\nis concerned).<\/p>\n

What
\nShould Not<\/i> be Built (686)
\nCheck the foundation. Is it rotten? In this section, Haynes works from
\nVirilio’s notion of the "trajective" (rather than objective or subjective) to
\nexplore the mode of being that involves "movement from here to there" (686). The
\nnomad, transcience. She couples the trajective to questions about architecture
\n(and ground), borrowing from Rajchman: "What would an architecture of such
\ntrajectories and movements look like?" (686). Here, Haynes also recombines the
\nflanuer (taken apart previously) and replaces him with the refugee as "the
\nfigure of the dispossessed" passing and dwelling different "zones of intensity"
\n(687). Citing Sirc, she mentions the change he articulates, drawing on
\navant-garde architects, artists, and theorists, from street "as mere topos<\/i>
\nto the street as event<\/i>" (687). Clearly she prefers the latter, aligning
\nwith Sirc in "groundless solidarity." Lebbeus Woods comes up, too, as Haynes
\ndraws up a "rhetoric of the unbuilt<\/i>" (688). Woods’ work is that of
\nspeculative, imagined architectures, the pre-concretized abstractions that peel
\nlayers from reality with uncertainty. More examples follow, of a "peace park"
\nbetween North and South Korea proposed by Natsios and Young, and of Libeskind’s
\nproposed model for the World Trade Center memorial: "Such projects remind us
\nthat a rhetoric of the unbuilt<\/i> must also consider (and rendered in<\/i>
\nin\/visible textures) unqualified<\/i> hope" (691). Haynes calls
\nthis section an "attempt to locate (and appropriate) permissible isomorphisms
\nbetween theoretical architecture and composition theory" (693) in such a way
\nthat can "bridge the expanse between reason and refuge" (695). "What
\nclearly was needed were not new objects, but a new orientation toward a
\nphenomenal field of events and interactions–not objects, but the abstract
\nregimes of force that organize and deploy them" (84) (694) [Read this alongside
\nLatour’s renewal of objects; could this be taken as an undesireable sort of
\nabstraction compatible with the sociology of the social?]<\/p>\n

Pedagogy
\nand the Refugee (695)
\n"One answer, then, to the question of what an architecture of trajectories would
\nlook like is: a boat in an intensive zone" (695). Instensive why?
\nWhat puts a boat in an intensive zone? (Piracy, mutiny, scurvy?) The density is
\nsharply up in this section; Haynes works at the problem of the "tourism
\nexperience" as relates to invoking refugee-as-figure for "abject forced
\nmobility" (696). The irrationality (unreasonableness) of refugees primes an
\nethical muddle: "It cannot<\/i> go without saying that removing the ground has
\nprofound implications for re-moving students into the murky waters of border
\npolitics" (697). Agamben, Agamben. Can’t be oblivious to matters of the
\nun-reason-able. Heidegger, Derrida (slow down!). Quarantining terms. Reason
\nthreatens to turn us away from Being itself (701). But a poetics of the trace
\nremains (some hope in this): Heidegger: "What is presumed to be eternal merely
\nconceals a suspended transiency, suspended in the void of durationless now."
\nHaynes finds in Heidegger a revived current (charge, voltage) for the poet,
\nstill, "Thus far we have scarcely issued a reading that can properly stand
\nbeside the refugee without addressing the incongruity of poetizing in the face
\nof their immediate and devastating dangers" (703). <\/p>\n

\nUnbuilding the Logic of Containment (704)
\nHaynes seems to be reassembling deconstruction, re-accounting for its
\nover-simplification, which made possible its take-down by proponents of
\n"practical reason" (704). Haynes goes back over deconstruction with an
\nabstraction-toothed comb, citing Caputo’s explanation that "Deconstruction
\noffers no excuse not to act<\/i>….Undecidability does not detract from the
\nurgency of decision; it simply underlines the difficulty" (704). Working through
\n"Derrida’s call for ‘forms of solidarity yet to be invented’" and matters of
\nhospitality and cosmopolitanism, Haynes works toward an assertion of "renegade
\nrhetorics" (707), incorporating nods to Ulmer, Worsham, Sirc, Vitanza, and
\nDavis, as she shows that "[r]hetoric as<\/i> refuge rearticulates the paths of
\nthe poets and illuminates their abstract trajectories. Displacing argument is
\nrhetoric’s supreme task; disinventing logos is rhetoric’s sacred duty" (707).
\nFor the concentrated push against argument and reason, this bit comes very close
\nto sound like an assertion–an argument for the heretical. "Into these un<\/i>commonplaces,
\nI submit rhetoric as refuge<\/i>, writer as refugee<\/i>, and abstract<\/i>
\npedagogy" (708). Haynes also admits her own (t)reason: an account of the program
\nat UTA, which was undone, some believe, by the "steady poisoning of rhetoric
\nwith the principle of reason" (708). Haynes continues to challenge the behemoth
\nof argumentation: "Our collective (t)reason<\/i> will be necessary to
\ndismantle this edifice" (710). <\/p>\n

Writing
\nNomadically (711)
\n"Keeping still to [her] desire to remain suggestive<\/i>," (711) Haynes
\ndeclares several musts in a string of manifesto-like challenges (take off the
\ngarb of the flaneur, dispossess our monopoly on abstraction, etc.). She tells
\nabout the "quasi-journal Archigram", which "rendered radical creations such as
\ncapsule apartments, walking cities (on the ocean), instant cities, university
\nnodes, most of which were never meant to ‘take up a finite configuration’"
\n(711)–the "unbuilt spoof in response to their view of traditional architecture
\nas hoax" (712). Receivables? Much like what Saper writes of in
\nNetworked Art <\/i>(on-sendings, kits, etc.). Archigram included a course with an
\nassignment called "depth probe" (713). Haynes correlates the depth probe
\nto Berthoff’s "abstraction as a speculative instrument" and then accounts for
\nthe discipline’s tenuous relationship to abstraction (713). Although it was a
\n"failure" in terms of uptake, Berthoff’s work, explains John Clifford, "takes
\nseriously her call to weld philosophical frames of reference to classroom
\ntechniques" (714). How much drift can we tolerate? Berthoff lamented that
\n"seemingly broad-minded theorists…refuse to see how far from shore we can
\ndrift on theoretial currents" (714). Abstract writing, abstracting practices are
\noverdue.<\/p>\n

"The diverse senses of converting argumentation pedagogy to teaching
\nabstraction could also include teaching how to achieve distance, to detach from
\none’s preconceptions, distill concepts, condense language, and translate
\nmeanings. Leaning to abstract would involve learning the alluring nature of
\nlanguage, how it draws you away, how it seduces you" (715). <\/p>\n

End: "at times I need this depth\/ forgive me" (715).<\/p>\n

Returns<\/p>\n