"From Cultural Criticism to Disciplinary Participation: Living with Powerful Words." Writing, Teaching, and Learning in the Disciplines, ed. Moran and Herrington. Modern Language Association, 1992: 61-68. reprinted in Harcourt Brace Guide to Writing in the Disciplines, ed. R. Jones.
Harcourt Brace, 1998.
From Cultural Criticism to Disciplinary Participation: Living with Powerful Words
Critical commonplace now has it that disciplines are socially and rhetorically constructed and that academic knowledge is the product of sociolinguistic activities advancing individual and group interests. In literary studies, we now readily assert that knowledge (at least of the academic kind) is made up out of words and other symbols, that words are made up by people, and that people have their own concerns to look out for--or even worse, that people are so imprisoned by the words they use that the words use the people to reproduce the words. Words almost seem a form of linguistic DNA that ineluctably re-creates itself through the appliance of human beings. Put most simply, you can't trust words to tell you the truth. Such a conclusion, logically unexceptionable within its assumptions, is a great disappointment to any foundational hopes we might have had about the enduring verity and universal authority of the results of our academic labors but is a great encouragement both to the humanist case against the perceived hegemony of sciences (natural and social) and to the radical case against all forms of institutionalized authority that may be perceived as sources of oppression.
This commonplace is precisely critical: rhetorical perception used as a means to distance ourselves from the everyday practice of the world's business in order to reveal and evaluate the hidden mechanisms of life. Indeed, such criticisms can challenge us to remake our world according to our own best lights instead of according to the masked advantage of the few or the imperatives of autonomous symbols beyond the interest of anyone. A much more ancient commonplace dear to the academy also suggests that we only live meaningfully when we have examined our lives. The more precisely we learn how the symbols by which we live have come into place, how they function, whose interests they serve, and how we may exert leverage on them to reform the world, the more we may act meaningfully upon our social desires. Exposing the choice making that lies behind the apparently solid and taken-for-granted world forces us to address the ethical question of our responsibility for our world.
Criticism, however, is only the beginning of action. Action is a participation, not a disengagement. Participation is the other side of rhetoric: the art of influencing others through language in the great social undertakings that shape the way we live. In the modern world, the academy has become one of the chief institutions of society, in producing socially respected knowledge, in creating concepts and practices that pervade culture and political economy, in advising social leaders, and in educating all. Participation in the academy is a significant means to individual and group influence in the constant reproduction and reshaping of our society. The modern academy is one of the great levers for social change. Disengagement from the academy, unless in the realistic hope of forming some other equally influential and better means of realizing social desires, is withdrawal from great social power, leaving that power in the hands of the very people we criticize for parochialism, narrow interest, and lack of social imagination: the epigoni of the disciplines.
Indeed, the cultural rhetorical critique of disciplinary writing of knowledge tends to bring into prominence the epigonistic formulas that may make the disciplines to seem static things, entrenching outdated beliefs, power and relationships, for such critiques often draw a picture of the current synchronic system of baseline expectations, the seemingly taken-for-granted assumptions that have emerged from the prior negotiations of language. These assumptions necessarily reflect the way things were for those who had influence and power in that negotiation, not the way things are now. Discourse is always in dialectical tension between what came before and new contenders constantly jockeying for voice in any vital communal endeavor. The notion that the rhetoric of a discipline is a uniform synchronic system hides both the historical struggle of heterogeneous forces that lies behind the current apparent regularity and the contemporary contention and complexity of discourse that is played out against the school-taught formulas of current convention. Rhetorical criticism, especially if it is carried out with broad sweeps of condemnation missing the detailed processes of rhetorical struggle, may make disciplines seem purveyors of hegemonic univocality rather than the locales of heteroglossic contention that they are.
Put most bluntly, cultural criticism of disciplines may fall far short of its mark because it believes too readily, and is thus too readily disappointed in, the textbook accounts of disciplinary work--that the disciplines are simply what they represent themselves to be to neophyte students. When we outside any particular discipline discover that a discipline is not all it says it is, does not achieve the irresistible harmony of irrefutable knowledge without serious contention, is not purely separable from its social consequences, and must depend on social forces for its support, we then may too readily believe that the discipline is unredeemably suspect. Yet people who get beyond the 101 textbook in any field begin to learn the complexities of the field, its history, its culture, its production and use of knowledge, its relation to other institutions in society, and its border skirmishes. They also feel and must consciously contend with the constraints and focuses put on their work through the habits, standards, and practices of the discipline, as well as recognize the strains among contending elements in the field and poachers from the neighboring field. In other words they must learn to locate themselves and their work on an ever changing, complex field where communal projects, goals, and knowledge are constantly negotiated from the individual perspectives and interests of participants within and without the field, even as they are all necessarily responsive to those highly powerful but nonetheless fluidly interpreted and reconstituted social facts of disciplinary institutionalization and control.
The overt teachings of a discipline, beginning with textbooks for schoolchildren and continuing through all forms of professional communication may ignore, or even suppress, this knowledge of the many contexts and forces in which the field operates, and which influentially shape the knowledge of the discipline (Latour, Science). The overt teachings may pretend that the work of the field is methodologically pure and intellectually isolatable from the messy complexity of the world; such overt teachings of methodological standards may in fact represent only the rhetorical move of one group who has gained the upper hand and is attempting to establish rules that purvey its position. Even when that position of epistemic hegemony may be well institutionalized and entrenched, methodological issues and apparently closed borders always remain available for renegotiation as difficult cases and new foci of concern evolve. Nonetheless, institutionally enforced epistemic standards may lead practitioners to relegate the impure facts of daily life to such backstage forms as jokes, late-night beer talk, or "political strategy" sessions (Gilbert and Mulkay).
Rhetorical analysis of the actual communications of the disciplines opens up and makes more visible these suppressed issues of the dynamics and evolving knowledge production of the disciplines. Rhetorical analysis can make visible the complexity of mutual participation of many people necessary to maintain the large projects of the disciplines, the recognition of the kinds of linguistic practice developed in consonance with the goals of the disciplinary projects, the constant struggle between competing formulations, and the constant innovative edge that keeps the discourse alive. Rhetorical analysis can also open up exclusions and enclosures of discourse to see how and why they are deployed and to question their necessity in any particular case.
But even more rhetorical analysis can provide the means for more informed and thoughtful participation in disciplines so that we can make the disciplines do the best work they were created for, rather than being the self-protecting domains of vested interest and social power that we fear. Rhetorical sophistication allows both insiders to move the discipline effectively and outsiders to negotiate with it and regain decisions that may have been inappropriately enclosed within the expert discourse.
When we teach students the rhetoric of the disciplines, thus, we are not necessarily indoctrinating them unreflectively into forms that will oppress them and others. Such oppressions of the self and others are more likely to occur when individuals learn communication patterns implicitly as a matter of getting along. Explicit teaching of discourse holds what is taught up for inspection, provides the students with means to rethink the ends of the discourse, and offers a wider array of means to carry the discourse in new directions.
The progress of rhetorical self-examination within anthropology provides a striking case in point of how critical examination of discourse can lead to deeper insight into the projects and knowledge of the discipline and to continuing innovation and vitality in the discourse and the disciplinary project, even when critical examination exposes that previous discourse was implicated in social, political, and economic relations that we now disown. Critical historical work on the discourse of anthropology has well demonstrated how the early accounts of anthropologists were part of late-nineteenth-century imperialism, with the United States attempting to subordinate and domesticate the Native American populations through the Bureau of Indian Affairs and European nations spreading their control over the other "primitive" peoples of the world who were being drawn under their political and economic "protection." The genre of ethnography with its authoritative representation of the primitive other, denied direct voice through the suppression of the active role of the native informant in representing the way of life and the elevation of the foreign anthropologist as the objective authority, became a chief textual means for Western societies to objectify the dominated peoples.
Recent critical work on ethnography (Clifford, Clifford and Marcus, Fabian, Geertz, Marcus, Marcus and Cushman, Rosaldo, Tyler) has not only pointed out these intrinsic dynamics of ethnographic texts but has also indicated how ethnography has changed in response to evolving understandings of the relations between "exotic" cultures and the "scientific" culture of the West. However, these revelations, along with the rejection of the social/economic relations of dominance thereby revealed, have not meant an end of the genre of ethnography. People still have multiple needs, both individually and institutionally, to represent their own and each other's lives to each other and for themselves. Questions of who speaks, who owns the discourse, who receives, and for what ends the discourse is carried on have opened up new experimental varieties of ethnography (for example, Rabinow, J. Dumont, Crapanzano) and more sensitive use of all varieties (see, for example, Van Maanen). Thus, rather than going out of fashion as discredited, ethnography as a genre has gained new vitality and has spread across the social sciences and even the humanities.
Detailed attention to disciplinary writing does not enslave us to the entrapments of the past but opens up choices for reevaluation and helps us explore the flexible and manifold resources available within traditional disciplinary genres as we understand and reconceive them more deeply. I have found a similar lesson in the response to my study of one of the most restrictive of disciplinary forms as prescriptively imposed by leaders of one discipline attempting to advance a dominant epistemology, theory, and research program. The format of the psychological experimental article as prescribed in the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association is the result of a self-conscious program of discipline building by behaviorist experimental psychologists over the middle of this century. In the manual's prescriptions behaviorists have indeed found an appropriate rhetoric for their project based on their assumptions and goals, and growing out of the dynamics of the professional discourse during this period (Bazerman, Shaping Written Knowledge, chap. 9). In becoming the official style of the most "scientific" of the social sciences, the APA style has been highly influential throughout all the social sciences. I have found that by analyzing the processes, dynamics, and assumptions of this institutionalization of style, I have not at all served to foster the enclosed dominance of this discourse. Rather professionals and students have largely responded that understanding the implied bagggage of the discourse has freed them to make rhetorical choices with greater clarity, whether to continue in the traditional forms, whether to modify them, or whether to abandon them altogether for more conducive discourse for other kinds of projects. The only resistance I have met to the analysis are from those who do not wish to think of their discourse as discourse and claim that their words and arguments carry no freight and are only epiphenomena of their "science." They claim they are writing the only way they could write in consonance with "good science." It is not the serious attention to disciplinary discourse that restricts our intellectual options but the refusal to attend that fosters the hegemony of narrow discourses.
When we do attend to the history and evolution of disciplinary discourses, we see complex heteroglossia, even in the most restricted genres, such as the scientific experimental report. Each newcomer to a field must anew come to understand, cope with, and place him- or herself within the evolving conversation. In studying the development of Isaac Newton's way of discussing his optical findings, a way that would have profound implications for all scientific discourse to follow, I saw Newton working to make sense of the discourses around him, find appropriate ways to address his audiences, respond to the conceptions and objections of his readers, and reforge a new discourse style that would carry overwhelming force on the discourse field that he only gradually came to understand. His final solutions in the compelling "Newtonian style" seemed to suppress all other voices but actually encompassed them in a way that they could not escape to make alternate claims for a century. In examining Newton 's rhetoric we move behind the massive social appearance of the supranatural genius Newton, "sailing through silent seas of thought alone," to understand humanistically an individual locating himself among others and finding powerful means to advance his own vision and claims (Bazerman, Shaping Written Knowledge, chap. 4). The history of all scientific discourse is built on such individual stories of people each coming to learn to use language effectively and thereby advancing the resources of language.
Once a rhetorical field is highly developed, each individual finds himself in the middle of an intertextual web within which he or she can act only by modifying the intertextuality through new statements. One's goals and activities influence one's idiosyncratic placement and interpretation of that intertextual field. When a modern physicist reads physics articles, he or she reads through the goals of advancing his or her own research project within a competitively structured argument over what claims are to be considered correct and important and how the literature should be added up and moved forward (Bazerman, Shaping Written Knowledge, chap. 8). There is constant negotiation among prior statements, new statements, responses, and further work over what constitutes credibility and creditibility (Myers, Writing; Latour and Woolgar). By reconstructing the literature around one's own ongoing work and then representing one's new work within that reconstructed matrix of the literature, each person makes the field over fresh and constructs a new place for the self.
Discourse studies of the disciplines aim to understand the evolving dynamics of each disciplinary field and the current state of play into which each new participant enters. Discourse studies of disciplines allow us to design courses that enable students to enter into disciplines as fully empowered speakers rather than as conventional followers of accepted practice, running as hard as they can just to keep up appearances. Even more, discourse studies can provide an enlightened perspective through which students can perceive the professional and disciplinary fields with which they will have to deal as outsiders. It is as important for an ecology activist or a community planner to see into the complexity of the discourse of biologists, geologists, and petrochemical engineers as it is for those professionals to have command of their own discourses.
By taking the discourse of professions and disciplines seriously, we will have the means to help students develop as active, reactive, and proactive members of their communities. With a sense of individual power, they can constantly press at the bit of the disciplinary practices they are trained into or run up against. Seeing through the appearances of the discourse, they can always keep in mind the fundamental goals of the fields in front of them, asking what kind of communication structures, patterns, and rhetorics will best enable the fields to achieve those goals, how they can contribute to those ends as individuals, and in what way the goals achieved through a single disciplinary discourse coordinate (if at all) with other social goals from other forms of social discourse. By understanding how knowledge is constructed, they in their professional lives can best judge what knowledge it is they wish to construct.
This adventure into the power of language in the modern world should not be a far digression for scholars of literary studies, for we have long been examining the power of language to shape the imagination in the religious struggles of the Reformation, the political struggles of the eighteenth century, and the industrial struggles of the nineteenth. Studying disciplinary discourse might mean looking into disciplines and professions we rejected as undergraduates when we chose the life of literary studies, but it certainly takes us no further into arcana than Puritan pamphlet wars, for the disciplines and professions encompass every aspect of our daily life as we near the end of the twentieth century. If we are to create a humane society for the next century, it is precisely the disciplinary and professional words we will have to keep from getting away from us. As much as we understand the powerful words of our society is as much as we will be able to live with and through them.