Converging ASS+U+M[E]+ptions


Rethinking binaries in a postmodern condition

Anne Wysocki (2001) pointed out the problems of conceptualizing writing as content and multimedia elements as form in her article “Impossibly Distinct: On Form/Content and Word/Image in Two Pieces of Computer-Based Interactive Multimedia.” She noted that we see a split between form and content because of the transparency we as readers have learned to accept through our familiarity with the forms, or the designs, of written text. Many others have argued this point, encouraging us to remember that written text—as stuck as it sometimes feels within academic modes of discourse—is often composed with aesthetic intentions. In English departments, poets and novelists know this, as do teachers of literature and style and editing. To refer back to Wesch’s reconsideration of form and content in relation to new media: Aesthetic and rhetorical choices, or (as we call it) creative and scholarly choices must be made in every text. Moreover, the meaning that those creative and scholarly choices engender should be made available for interpretation in every reading of every text. In this section, we examine several theoretical perspectives on this creative/scholarly split in order to interrogate our own assumptions (as well as our readers’ assumptions) regarding what we value (or can value) in English studies and related fields. Because new media texts typically converge these binaries in their presentation, we believe it is important to examine historical understandings of these binaries, which will allow us to show that new media texts can have a welcome place in our departments.

 

James Berlin (1991) struggled to locate rhetoric within the rhetoric/poetic split he saw manifested in contemporary English departments. He explained how "English" came to be associated more firmly along the poetic side of the divide—the side that places superiority with the poet who somehow stands outside the dominant power structures—and relegated rhetoric to first-year composition studies in an attempt to redress the lack of writing preparation students received at the high school level. Berlin argued that changes in the economic and social structures during the 18th and 19th centuries led to a conception of the poetic as pure aestheticism, isolated from other spheres of human activity, especially politics and science. Using the work of Raymond Williams (i.e., Marxism and Literature), Berlin located an important shift in the conceptualization of (l/L)iterature: "[literature] lost its early sense of reading ability and reading experience, and became an apparently objective category of printed works of a certain quality" (25). This shift engendered three tendencies:

Gerald Graff's (1987) characterizations of contemporary English departments in Professing Literature mirrored the binary oppositions that Berlin explored: Literary texts were associated with the imaginary, the aesthetic, and the disinterested appeal to taste and sensibility while rhetorical texts were associated with the scientific, the practical, and the interested appeals to the public intellect and reason (p. 28). While Graff claimed that such distinctions do not represent class distinctions, Pierre Bourdieu suggested that "art has meaning and interest only for someone who possesses the cultural competence [or has the cultural capital], that is, the code into which it is encoded" (qtd. in Berlin, 1991, p. 30). In this light, English department privileging of those texts determined to be literary ultimately serves the managerial class, thus devaluing other texts and excluding those who have not been trained in the proper aesthetic responses to texts. Then, they further reify those distinctions by "precluding reading and writing practices that might address inequalities in the existing social order" (p. 33).

 

Joe Marshall Hardin (2001) also described the English studies split between creative and scholarly texts in relation to the high, aesthetic culture of literature versus the low, popular, and service-oriented (i.e., grammar-oriented) culture of composition. Hardin remarked, on the one side, that composition studies is generally considered the “low form” of English studies, concerned as it tends to be with the rhetorical content of academic arguments. Literary studies, on the other side, are generally oriented toward art to a greater degree and they are concerned with the aesthetic form and reception of creative texts. Hardin claimed that this comp–lit split mimicked an unhealthy art-culture system of high (or valued) art versus low (or kitschy, nonvaluable) art within English departments. He compared literature to high art worthy of academic pursuit while composition and rhetoric was comparable to low forms such as pop art (the subtext being that pop art/culture is not worthy of academic pursuit). His purpose in making this comparison was not to say that composition studies, or its connection to rhetorical studies, was indeed a low form of art, but to suggest that English studies needed a bridge between low and high forms—one that would satisfy, or rather rectify, the traditional high/low, literature/composition, aesthetics/rhetorical-as-mechanical split but also one that would allow for students to take advantage of the both/and in their writing practices. Specifically, Hardin called for a change in the way student writing is taught, suggesting that students should be allowed to work against and challenge “the binary of 'high' and 'low' culture" by producing "texts that might be acceptable within the culture of the academy and within the culture at-large" (p. 212). That is, to bridge the high/low textual split in English studies, we should ask students to produce texts that are acceptable in both academic and popular settings—utilizing both rhetorical and aesthetic modes of discourse.

 

Berlin (1991) argued that education has always been a disciplinary endeavor—a cultural attempt to teach students the acceptable forms of reading, writing, speaking, and thinking. All of these educational objectives have been subsumed at one time or another under the guise of rhetoric and English studies. Berlin associated rhetoric with the production of texts and poetic with the interpretation of texts. But Berlin also offered an alternative approach to English studies: Under social epistemic rhetoric, distinctions such as poetic/rhetoric and public/private disappear since all language enters into a relationship between writer, reader, text, and the material conditions that influence their interactions (p. 35). Quoting Williams, Berlin said criticism became a “conscious exercise” of “taste,” “sensibility,” and “discrimination” (p. 25). The technological advancements in the printing press of the late nineteenth century allowed editors to “move [toward] the consumption of printed works and away from their production” (p. 26). Printed work, free from the class and social encumbrances involved in its publication, shifted the notion of literary criticism toward a “mechanical discourse” removed from any political realm and relegated to the “mythic and aesthetic” in order to uphold notions of “taste and sensibility” (p. 26). As early as 1894, prominent editorialist and publisher E.L. Godkin (1974) had already noticed this trend, noting that education served to standardize “the intellectual outlook . . . in relation to [its] duties to the community at large” (p. 198). Moreover, education typically meant a decrease in political activity:


It is a very rare thing for an educated man to say anything publicly about the questions of the day. He is absorbed in science, art, or literature, in the practice of his profession, or in the conduct of his business; and if he has any interest at all in public affairs, it is a languid one. He is silent because he does not much care, or because he does not wish to embarrass the administration or “hurt the party,” or because he does not feel that anything he could say would make much difference (p. 211).


Political and social apathy is not necessarily a condition of the postmodern condition, and it certainly does not have to be a condition of what we would label our “digital native” students nor of the Web 2.0 lives we lead. Writing as we are, in the midst of the 2008 Presidential primaries, we feel optomistic in saying that political apathy may soon be displaced by a striking rise in political inter/action as seen through YouTube debates; higher-than-average voter turn-out, especially among younger populations; and blogs kept by candidates and voters. Yet, 2004 presidential candidate Howard Dean and 2008 candidate Ron Paul have both used the internet to raise significant funds in support of their campaigns. But, like the newpapers of 100 years ago, this new type of communication is messy and difficult to control. Not like literature that comes neatly packaged between hardcovers with already internalized instructions for consumption.

 

François Lyotard (1997) suggested that


universities and the institutions of higher learning are called upon to create skills, and no longer ideals. . . . The transmission of knowledge is no longer designed to train an elite capable of guiding the nation towards its emancipation [as liberal pedagogues and Habermas might have argued], but to supply the system with players capable of acceptably fulfilling their roles at the pragmatic posts required by its institutions. (p. 48)


He painted a depressing picture of adult education “a la carte,” whereby a student can pick up the skills she needs while bypassing the critical thinking bar in the university buffet (or production) line (p. 49). He did leave us an important rhetorical out, if you will: “What is of utmost importance is the capacity to actualize the relevant data for solving a problem ‘here and now,’ and to organize that data into an efficient strategy” (p. 51). We can teach our students how to obtain the most effective information for a particular argument, formulate arguments with that information, and learn new strategies for analyzing and arranging. We can teach students to use rhetoric and aesthetics, which, we argue, “allows one either to make a new move or change the rules of the game” (p. 52).