Composition at the End of Everything; or, The Bravery of Being Out of Range: What's Wrong with a Postmodern Composition Theory?

Keffy Lowe

I would like to argue that our students--our teaching mission--offer us a way of bypassing the tangle of theoretical disagreements and gluing the fragmented pieces of our discipline back together again not into a once-and-for-all rigidity of either structure or orthodoxy, but at least into a shape, into an enterprise that can define its primary aims.

-- Marshall Gregory
"The Discipline of English and the 'Empty Center'
of the Field's Sense of Itself"

GIVE THE (TEACHER) WHAT S/HE WANTS: THE PROBLEMATIC CONSTRUCTION OF THE POSTMODERN/STUDENT-CENTERED CLASSROOM

I must admit that I truly enjoy reading postmodern theory and literature, and feel that much of it presents a valid critique of the social, cultural, economic, and/or political situation(s) in late twentieth-century America--especially as they plague our students. I say this despite the inability of even the most thorough and/or sublime of postmodernists to "define" what it is they are discussing and therefore presenting much of postmodernism as a through-the-looking-glass construct. Be that as it may, I find the pieces in College Composition & Communication, College English, JAC: A Journal of Composition Theory (as well as in "noncomposition" journals like Critical Inquiry) and in book-length works ranging from Faigley Fragments of Rationality and Berlin Rhetorics, Poetics, and Cultures to collections like Contending with Words to be great fun--much, I submit, like playing chess, attempting to reason with a six-yearold, eating acid, or attempting to come to grips with Mahler can be--a terrific, sometimes mind-expanding experience--but one that leaves me wondering what I've just done and why on earth I've done it.

But what, I submit, does postmodernism as a composition theory do for students and teachers who don't have the time, the energy, the desire, or indeed, the institutional mandate or mission to use the typical introductory composition course to "bring about more democratic and personally humane economic, social, and political arrangements" ( Berlin116)?

The idea that a postmodern composition theory looks good on paper but leaves a lot to be desired in the classroom is what I would like to argue here. The old conservative charge, that writing teachers are simply using the classroom as a forum for their own political agenda, while also interesting, will not be addressed in this chapter. On a political level, I am very sympathetic toward the liberal progressive postmodern agenda and in my personal life I work toward social justice and a politics of inclusion.

My worry about taking politics and making them the forefront of the composition classroom comes about not because of my own politics, but from a sense that the classroom shouldn't be about me and/or my political agenda.

The idea that recurs throughout much postmodern composition theory, that students ought to be taught to "resist" things--whether it is the dominant State ideology/discourse/hegemony, television, The Wall Street Journal editorial page, or their own desires--seems a difficult/complex pedagogical move; indeed, how, I wonder, do we "teach" students to "resist" things in discreet box A all the while not having them resist the things in discreet box B (in other words, what do I do with the student who feels that it is necessary to "resist" things like attendance policies, due dates, speeding laws, or, in a far more serious vein, sexual harassment policies or the civil rights of his/her fellow students)? And how do we "help" them resist those items/ideologies in discreet box A without "giving" them pre-formed value judgment about the things in discreet box B?

It is one thing to treat students fairly, to attend to their painful problems, to encourage their resistance to the system, to listen between the lines of their inarticulateness, and quite another to make their interests the main concerns of the class.

The question, and I don't think it can be asked enough, is simple: Who benefits when the conflict between student and teacher desire/interest is "subverted" or "resisted" to the point where it magically ends up in/at the place the teacher wants it to be? Let me try a concrete example.

Most of the students at Mount Union College are very interested in sports--partly because of our location (northeast Ohio, where, I am constantly reminded, professional football was, well, professionalized) and partly because of the wild success of our athletic programs (four division III football championships in six years, as well as division titles in basketball, wrestling, track, swimming, soccer . . . well, one gets the picture--and these are not only men's teams; the swimming, soccer, basketball, and track teams were women's' teams). Many of the students in our first-year writing courses would be, undoubtedly, happy to discuss sports at every class meeting. What happens to these students, as happens to be the case more often than not, when the only person in the room not interested in sports is the teacher? What, in other words, is so "democratic" about the teacher subverting the class into a critique of sports when that is the last thing the students want? To claim, as some will, that students "wanting", to talk unreflexively about sports is simply a reflection of the students' desire to enter the dominant hegemony, and to posit such desire as "bad" or "ignorant" or "naive" strikes me as the height of both arrogance and elitism. Did somebody say resistance?

I realize the rather simplistic nature of my example, so let me unpack it a bit. Under no circumstances do I advocate the use of the composition classroom to discuss the latest trades or who won and who lost the big game last night. Nor (and this, I think, is what many of the more politically minded fear most) does this classroom "worship" the athlete as a model of manliness and thus abrogate any sort of social responsibility for the student-athlete who abuses his/her power (in the classroom, bedroom, or locker room). My argument is simply that if an instructor is truly interested, as Sosnoski and others claim to be, in making the class center on the students' lives, then it would seem only logical to really become interested in what the students are interested in, and not some sort of projection of what they should be interested in. 

start with the personal experience of the students, with emphasis on the position of this experience within its formative context. Our [the teachers of the course] main concern is the relation of current signifying practices to the structuring of subjectivities--of race, class, sexual orientation, age, ethnic, and gender formations, for example, in our students and ourselves.

For the past five years, the Cleveland Indians have been either in the playoffs or the World Series. Needless to say, the attention paid to the team in the local media and the rabid and vocal fan support is, in this part of the state, nearly omnipresent. Each semester in my college writing courses, I have had the students read and write about the Indians, specifically, the students are asked to encounter, from a variety of perspectives, the horrifyingly racist symbol/mascot of the team, "Chief Wahoo." During this time, we read and discuss Ward Churchill's excellent essay "Indians R US? Let's Spread the 'Fun' Around: The Issue of Sports Team Names and Mascots," as well as Michael Dorris "For The Indians, No Thanksgiving." I try to "balance" or "juxtapose" (choose your pedagogical weapon) these essays with press releases from the Indians organization, editorials and columns from local newspapers, and excerpts from Charles Alexander's Our Game: An American Baseball History. We have wonderfully rancorous class discussions, most (and this still never ceases to amaze me) revolving around the perceived opportunism of the Native-American protesters ("Where were they," the question always goes, "when the Indians were losing"?). Such questions, I will admit, leave me stymied by the deeply held feelings of identity and privilege and ownership that the students have about the Indians mascot (and the utter unwillingness to even recognize the racist nature of the symbol). If these feelings were the result of a discussion about slavery or welfare or affirmative action or gay rights, the students would meet with stiff social and potentially even administrative resistance--yet for Chief Wahoo, there is broad social and administrative support; thus, to ask students to "resist" the racist symbol of the Cleveland Indians is to ask them to work counter to the local culture, the school administration, and nearly all of their daily life. And while this unit can lead to some interesting discussion(s) about the rights of groups to forge their own identities and the power associated with naming things, students simply don't want to hear it. The power of sports in the lives of these college students is stunning. 

This, of course, could be a problem for the classroom that Berlin envisions in Rhetorics, Poetics, and Cultures. Donald Jones, among others (and here he is borrowing from Patricia Bizzell), argues very effectively that Resistance against presumably oppressive discursive practices requires most students to doubt too much of their previous knowledge. They are unwilling to submit to this pervasive skepticism because postmodern instructors offer few specific alternatives to their present beliefs or even a way to develop such options. 

In other words, what often passes for a "critique" of sports in a postmodern classroom becomes, in reality, an indictment of students who like sports, wear athletic apparel, play on athletic teams, or want to write papers related, in some way, to sports. Why would a student want to be in a class like this, and why (and this is even more important) would a student do anything but "shut down" intellectually when it became apparent that her/his values, beliefs, dreams, etc. are simply, in the eyes of their instructor, mindless "perpetuation[s] of the dominant discourses"? The postmodern binary at work here is the idea that students can't be "thoughtful" and also believe in things their instructor doesn't.