Cultural Studies and Professional Writing

I was discussing the role of the cultural and political in professional writing courses earlier today and thought I would expand on some ideas.

1. There is at least a tradition, if not a current practice, of perceiving profesisonal writing as apolitical. In technical writing, it is the articulation of writing as transparent communication of information. In more "creative" genres, it's about finding your individual voice and being "true" to yourself.

It's not so much that I would suggest that technical writers are not trying to communicate or that in some sense writers don't have particular "voices" or styles that need to be developed and explored. It's just that this is a rather simplistic way of understanding writing. I'm not sure if you could say that it is a "left" or "right" wing understanding; it certainly is a common understanding. It should hardly be surprising that most people, regardless of politics, understand very little about writing. Certainly, some argue that conservatives, in general, prefer to see the world in black and white, in simplistic terms, moreso than liberals. Maybe so. I will say that seeing writing (or anything else) in a complex way requires a willingness (and a capability) to do some intellectual work.

And, btw, we don't just invent complexity for the fun of it. We investigate writing practices, uncovering their complexity, because we discover that our more simplistic understanding is incomplete and often misleading.

2. Cultural studies has a long association with rhetoric. Both, at least in my view, study the construction of meaning in communities. Both study how individuals and groups use language and other media to develop and share knowledge, to create and resolve conflicts, and to plan, enact, and review individual and collective action.

Cultural studies offers professional writing methods for understanding how the conventions of discourses are established, maintained, and disseminated; how and why different communities interpret texts differently; how ideology functions to shape the cultural roles and practices of writers and audiences; how technologies interact with meaning-making; and so on.

Simultaneously, cultural studies also uncovers how conventional discursive practices work to maintain the status quo, naturalize mainstream ideology, and marginalize non-dominant voices. In doing so, it woudl suggest not only that our conventional, "simplistic," ideas of writing are not only simple but are also political and in service to the dominant ideology.

3. In doing so, cultural studies politicizes professional writing in a way that makes the job of teaching writing much more difficult. Students must not only learn to write professionally; they must also learn to negotiate the ideological mechanisms of discourse. Also, by insisting on dealing with the ideological undercurrent of discourse, cultural studies draws professional writing to the left in a context where it is impossible to be apolitical.

Here, it becomes necessary to deal with racism, sexism, all the familiar mechanisms of ideological control. However doing so also politically charges the classroom as conservatives and liberals act out the roles they learn from watching the network news. In all this conflict, and in the context of the deeply conservative mainstream media slandering higher education, how much is accomplished here? And how much of this type of conversation will help students to negotiate the difficult ideological terrain of professional writing?

4. Thinking about my students as writers helps me to keep these concerns focused. For me, this focus brings me back to the issue of authorship and composition itself. At the heart of our simplistic conventional understanding of writing is the author-in-control-of-the-text. When the fiction of authorship is deconstructed, we are left with insight into the network of symbolic relations with which the writer interfaces and the process of ripping material from the network, mixing it together, and burning it into a new composition: a recursive process that blurs the distinction between writer and network.

This does not obviate us from responsibility for our productions, but it does help us understand that we do not simply "author" our texts. As authors, students become the target of critique: "your text is racist" implies "you are racist." I am not interested in this tactic of bad conscience. I don't think anyone really is. However, by understanding the network of ideology and composition more complexly, we move into viewing the writer as logged into an ideological-symbolic information system.

Subject positions, such as "the" author or "the" college student or whatever mix'n match identity of various sexual, racial-ethnic, gender, class, and consumer categories, constitute, to use a rough analogy, a network protocol for how one is identified in the system. We are these things, more or less, or more accurately more and less: we are more than these categories suggest and we are also less than all that might be attributable culturally to these categories.

In giving up our identity as the author, we can depersonalize our relationship to the texts we produce while remaining responsible for them. Similarly, in recognizing our subjecitivity as ideological fiction, we open an impersonal space for investigating ideology, without attachment. I should not that the fact that identities are ideological fictions clearly does not mean that they do not have a material impact upon us or our culture, or that we can simply step away from them. They are sticky; or better put, they have a strong gravitational pull.

What has interested me about writing, from the very start of graduate school, is how writing practice might offer a line of flight, escape velocity. Writing's very materiality; its pluridimensional insistence on being other than one's thoughts; the cracks that open in the VR of ideology through experimenting with the other virtual, the unfolding of thought in the network.

Comments

[comp mafia;)]

In giving up our identity as the author, we can depersonalize our relationship to the texts we produce while remaining responsible for them. Similarly, in recognizing our subjecitivity as ideological fiction, we open an impersonal space for investigating ideology, without attachment. I should not that the fact that identities are ideological fictions clearly does not mean that they do not have a material impact upon us or our culture, or that we can simply step away from them. They are sticky; or better put, they have a strong gravitational pull.

Isn't cultural studies also supposed to about transformation -- or at least some semblance thereof -- of self/culture? And how can such transformation come about if one "depersonalizes" their relationship to texts?

Sure, it's one thing to demystify the author as a function for organizing the literary canon; however, in another sense, isn't such "depersonalization" also an (insidious) aim of corporate life, i.e., a denial (or mass manufacture) of the interior lives of workers/consumers? That is, Corporation-In-Control-Of-The-Consumer-Text.

And how about not only the pseudo-belief in the apolitical but also the lack of an aesthetic & voice in much technical writing?

Just throwing these thoughts out there, Alex, in good spirit -- very skeptical of the notion of "an impersonal space for investigating ideology, without attachment." Many corporations are quite good at denying concern for the "personal," and not necessarily for the better. No attachments -- no responsibility for their employees and customers??? Another way of examining the issue.

[Alex]

Good point(s). "Impersonal"is a poor choice of words for what I am after. Subpersonal? A-personal? Or is that only so much jargon?

I'm suggesting there is a moment/site where the unfolding of consciousness/thought is apprehended by language and ideology (which are linked but are not identical). That apprehension is powerful, cybernetic, gravitational, but ultimately partial.

This moment/site is also a compositional event. And I am interested in the pedagogy of this event. Not because it is "outside" or "pre-" ideological: the compositional process draws upon a techno-ideological network of information. However neither embodied cognition nor the materiality of symbolic behavior can be reduced to ideology.

I am still not describing it well, but this is what I was trying to articulate with the notion of "impersonal." So perhaps what I am pursuing is a pedagogy that, like some Buddhist meditation, seeks to become aware of thoughts as they "become," i.e., to become aware of our own compositional process.

Here, the issue of detachment does not mean to be uncaring or insensitive. I think the danger of a cultural studies pedagogy is that it becomes a pedagogy of bad conscience. Instead of employing cultural studies as a critique of subjectivity as ideology, I am exploring how it becomes a productive/compositional mode. I suppose I'm drawing on some of Brian Massumi's arguments here, trying to think about how they might relate to teaching writing.

Anyway, I'll work on finding a better way to express this.

[comp mafia;)]

Yes, it's a hallway of rhetorical mirrors, in a way.

Interesting that you bring up Massumi -- I have become very ambivalent about Massumi since he gave a rather dispassionate -- errrr, disembodied -- job talk, say, 5-6 years ago. His thoughts about fear from a decade ago remain relevant; yet, I have come to wonder about the discourse he adopts and its conversational potential beyond hallowed halls. Massumi in the flesh-and-blood was quite different than Massumi in textual format.

And this really is about the issue of discourse and translation, and how to make cultural studies projects comprehendible to the novices/publics who often inhabit comp courses, and I am not sure anymore if Massumi assists in that endeavor very well. Perhaps it is a lot easier to explain the precepts of Buddhism to students or that they embody beliefs (i.e., racism) without necessarity consciously selecting those beliefs and which no method of critique can necessarily "deprogram" them of -- which is what I now understand you to be meaning by "depersonalize." In other words, as I understand what you are saying, not "fixating" the (personal) identities of students to their belief systems, which are ever mutable, unlike their texts (once fossilized). This contradicts that whole notion that we can pin them down vis-a-vis their texts and tinker with their minds until they see the errors of their ways. I agree with you that the impulse to demystify ideology is often about a control impulse more than an illuminating impulse. And Buddhism is, indeed, about letting go of control -- if that is what you are meaning by "impersonal." But the problem, as I see it, is more on the teacher's end than on the student's end, i.e., giving up the will to fixate students to their texts and admitting that they/we can never completely know their/our students and what they need to know, no matter what theoretical lenses are used. We just can never know if the discourses of "cultural studies" are sufficient for what they need to make their way in the world.

And your concept of "ripping from the network" is quite similar to that of the bricoleur, if you think about it, and in truth, that's a very radical, destabilizing concept in the face of any structured education. To let students rip from the network/academia/cultural studies as they see fit is also about teachers giving up the will-to-control-the-student-text.

Again, throwing thoughts out there.