I'm hoping that my Cmap is accessible--when I clcik on the question mark icon it takes me to it, and I hope that's the same for everyone else. I think I'm the only one using Thinkature instead of the other site, and that's probably the source of my woes. I also have the flu, so my thoughts are muddled--I'll do my best to be clear.
Preface to abstract: One thing that has interested me for quite some time is the role of the university within democracy. In terms of rhetoric and the social, we have seen this concern arise several times in the texts that we have read, specifically in terms of critical pedagogy. At the same time that this pedagogical role of rhetoric within democracy is being theorized, there is a sense that liberal democracy is itself being interrogated--we have seen this in the Crowley reading, of course, but I believe that Crowley's concern is part of a broader issue (the culture wars, of course, but there are other variations... the Habermas-Lyotard debate, for example, was largely couched in terms of the limits of Enlightenment positivism and liberalism). There is, then, an ongoing reconstitution of society, of the social, and here Latour's work is indispensable. For my research paper, I want to investigate the role critical pedagogy might continue to play in terms of the reconstituted social in terms of enacting democracy in the classroom. My research question, then, is given that rhetoric and democracy are intimately related, yet that the social is being reconstituted, what is the role of rhet/comp classrooms in serving as sites for enacting democracy?
Abstract:
The role of rhetoric is central to the liberal democracy of the United States. Rhetoric is used at all levels of government--it is used in crafting legislation, it is used to persuade juries and justices, it is used to persuade the country to go to war. An ability to engage rhetoric--to use it, critique it, synthesize it with one's own beliefs and past experiences--is arguably crucial to one's role as a citizen. This centrality of rhetoric, of language, in the enacting of democracy is thus a concern for those concerned with the teaching of rhetoric and language--as Gerald Graff asserts in his "Foreward" to Richard Ohmann's _English in America: A Radical View of the Profession_, "...whoever controls language controls the way we think and act. With the massive expansion of American democratic education in this country, school and college English teachers have considerable opportunity to shape the way young Americans talk, write, and think about the world. That is no doubt why the teaching of English and the humanities has become a major battleground in the recent war over culture" (ix). This "recent war of culture," however, has foregrounded critiques of liberal democracy from various corners. Sharon Crowley, for example, outlines what she sees as an emerging Christian fundamentalist hegemony which advocates values incompatible with those of liberal democracy, while Slavoj Zizek sees liberalism as hopelessly mired in capitalism, which is itself a fundamentalism. There is a challenge to liberal democracy on broader grounds--that of a critique of the Enlightenment project of modernity-- made to various degrees and ends by figures such as Jean-Francois Lyotard, Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault. Part of this critique involves the positing of the social construction of identity and of knowledge itself--philosophers of science such as Thomas Kuhn and Richard Rorty have engaged the social construction of scientific knowledge. Reason, liberalism, positivism--all are being interrogated. One might say that they have been exhausted, just as the social sciences have been exhausted in the view of Bruno Latour. Latour concedes that work within the social sciences has been productive, but the very success of these efforts has led to a point where constituents can not be separated from the social domain--the connections between these constituents have to be retraced, reconfigured, reconstituted in order for us to understand society as it now exists. As a point of departure, then, it seems productive to integrate Latour's Actor Network Theory and his ideas in _Reassembling the Social_ with those of critical pedagogy in order to address what role rhetoric and composition is to play in the enacting of democracy as the "war over culture" is waged in classrooms and other social spaces.
Critical pedagogy includes within several figures and their individual approaches. A survey of the most promising among them might prove productive to engaging the reassembled social in an effor to enact democracy. Paulo Freire's _Pedagogy of the Oppressed_ immediately comes to mind, as does a work highly iinfluenced by it, bell hooks' _Teaching to Transgress_. The _Rhetorical Democracy_ project headed by Gerard Hauser can contribute much, as can James Berlin's work, as well as work collected in _Composition and Resistance_, edited by C. Mark Haulbert and Michael Blitz. Other authors whose work in engaged pedagogy is to be considered include Andrea Greenbaum, Patricia Bizzell, Richard Ohmann and Gerald Graff. A related thread to consider is how the writer/rhetor can be regarded as the subject of contending social forces--this thread dovetails with other theories of social construction that have been considered and writers in this vein include Kurt Spellmeyer, David Bartholomae, and Karen Burke LeFevre.
Another thread that might be productive in exploring the intersection between the reassembled social and critical pedagogy is the role critical theory might explicitly play. One emergent quality of society in the past few decades has been the foregrounding of pluralism, though pluralism is arguably itself a democratic principle. Pluralism has played out in terms of identity politics and multiculturalism, and while these developments have proved problematic, an offshoot of each is the possibility of hybridized identities, such as Gloria Anzaldua's Mestiza identity in _La frontera_/_Borderlands_. Anzaldua, in fact, epitomizes the matrix of identity that exists between race, gender, class and sexual orienation (one might add ideology, as well). The hybrid--or even cyborg or post-human (Donna Haraway's and Lyotard's terms, respectively) is arguably the model citizen of the reassembled social: the hybrid serves as metaphor for what constitutes the reassembled society.
Works Cited:
Anzaldua, Gloria. La frontera/Borderlands. San Francisco : Aunt Lute Books, c1999.
Bartholomae, David. Writing on the Margins: Essays on Composition and Teaching. Boston : Bedford/St. Martins, c2005.
Berlin, James A. Rhetoric and Reality: Writing Instruction In American Colleges 1900 1985. Carbondale : Southern Illinois University Press, c1987.
Berlin, James A. Rhetorics, Poetics, and Cultures. Urbana: National Council of Teachers of English, 1996.
Bizzell, Patricia. Academic Discourse and Critical Consciousness. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1992.
Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York :
Routledge, 1990.
Crowley, Sharon. Toward a Civil Discourse: Rhetoric and Fundamentalism. Pittsburgh, PA : University of Pittsburgh Press, c2006.
Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York : Continuum, 1986, c1970.
Graff, Gerald. Professing Literature: An Institutional History. Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 1987.
Greenbaum, Andrea. Emancipatory Movements in Composition. Albany : State University of New York Press, c2002.
Habermas, Jürgen. “Modernity—An Incomplete Project,” reprinted in The Anti-aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, edited by Hal Foster. Seattle: Bay Press, 1983.
Habermas, Jürgen. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. Cambridge, Mass. : MIT Press ; Cambridge, England : Polity Press, 1989.
Haraway, Donna. “A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s,” reprinted in The Haraway Reader. New York : Routledge, 2004.
Hauser, Gerard A. and Amy Grim, Eds. Rhetorical Democracy: Discursive Practices of Civic Engagement: Selected Papers from the 2002 Conference of the Rhetoric Society of America. Mahwah, N.J. : Lawrence Erlbaum, 2003.
hooks, bell. Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. New York : Routledge, 1994.
Hulbert, C. Mark and Michael Blitz, Eds. Composition and Resistance. Portsmouth, NH : Boynton/Cook, c1991.
Kuhn, Thomas. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 1970
Latour, Bruno. Reassembling the Social. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.
Latour, Bruno. We Have Never Been Modern. Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press, 1993.
Latour, Bruno. Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy. Cambridge, Mass. : MIT Press ; [Karlsruhe, Germany] : ZKM/Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe, c2005.
LeFevre, Karen Burke. Invention As a Social Act. Carbondale : Southern Illinois University Press, c1987.
Lyotard, Jean-Francois. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, c1984.
Ohmann, Richard. English in America: A Radical View of the Profession. New York : Oxford University Press, 1976.
Smit, David W. The End of Composition Studies. Carbondale : Southern Illinois University Press, c2004.
Spellmeyer, Kurt. Common Ground : Dialogue, Understanding, And The Teaching Of Composition. Englewood Cliffs, N.J. : Prentice Hall, c1993.
Zizek, Slavoj. Welcome to the Desert of the Real!: Five Essays on September 11 and Related Dates. London : Verso, 2002.
Borradori, Giovanna. Philosophy in the Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida. Chicago: University of Chicago
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