After my post in response to Tony Scott’s article I decided to go back and take a look at Kathleen Blake Yancey’s article, “Made Not Only in Words: Composition in a New Key.” To be honest, I don’t think I read her article when it came out in CCCs in 2004 in part because I saw most of her Keynote Address at CCCCs in San Antonio–and that was what was published in CCCs. So, I made the mistake of not reading her article back then…but I am glad I did now.

Before I get ahead of myself, I want to say that I fully agree with Scott’s concern that Yancey’s proposal for “Composition in a New Key,”

doesn’t mention the circumstances under which first-year composition is typically taught: it doesn’t mention contingent teaching labor, or the fact that professional scholars with Ph.D.s in rhetoric and composition don’t actually teach the overwhelming majority of first-year composition classes. If professionals in rhetoric and composition who are in a position to do so “carry forward” from first-year composition, will it be as managers and theorizers of a project that further expands the de-professionalization of teaching in academia? (83).

I think Scott is dead on when he insists that any re-imagining of composition cannot be divorced from discussions of material resources. I would hope that compositionists–especially compositionists–take to heart the long and problematic history of staffing composition classes with adjuncts and temporary faculty members and the the work of compositionists such as Eileen Schell, Patricia Lambert Stock, Bruce Horner, Jim Zebroski, and Nancy Mack who have brought the struggle for equitable working conditions and labor organizing into the mainstream discussion of our field. However, in my mind Scott is right to continue to insist because in the absence of pressure, I’d put my money on a convenient “forgetting” of labor issues.

Having said that, however, I’ve got to say that Scott’s response underscores what I see as a persistent problem “we” on comp/rhet left (and the left in general, I think) have in terms of how we engage in critique. In particular, how begin re-thinking proposals/possibilities through a lens that refuses a separations between the curricular/scholarly proposals and the material conditions of labor. Let me see if I can tease this one out.

In Scott’s response to Yancey’s proposal he reads her proposal as “avoiding” institutional factors, in particular, the resources that would be necessary to staff her proposed curriculum. Scott is rightly concerned that without addressing the issue directly, the fall-back position will be to (re)create and reinforce a two-tiered labor system–where the first-year course is staffed by adjuncts. It’s the next step that bothers me.

Yes, Scott looks to getting rid of the first-year course as a possibility (I addressed my objections to this in my previous post). But that is only part of the issue. The issue is that there is a qualitative shift in Scott’s approach to “problem”–one that only reproduces the split between a “scholarly perspective” and a “labor perspective.” To overstate and simplify the issue, we could say that Scott uses “material conditions” as a way to eliminate the possibility of Yancey’s proposal. Further, Yancey is positioned as and “elite,” divorced from the “real” conditions of labor. She is in her ivory tower in, well, the ivory tower. Scott, thus, contributes to a gap–a dissonance-filled communication gap–that makes any synthesis of Scott’s argument and Yancey’s proposal all the more difficult. In that gap qualifications sound like corporate PR; attention to working conditions sounds like entrenched self-interest. In short, positing material working conditions against scholarship and curriculum reinforces the mental/manual, scholarship/teaching binary that defines our mental maps of academic (and all) work.

What I want to suggest is that there are other ways of responding that speak to other possibilities–not only in terms of responding to concrete proposals, but in terms of how we discursively and materially (re)construct political communities. Put another way, the way Scott responds to Yancey is also a text that we need to read unless we are fine with the way things are. Which brings me back to my recent reading of Yancey’s article.

Frankly, I think much of what she argues is right on the money–in particular, her framing of the proliferation of digital communication as the technological companion of an emerging (or an already emerged) writing public calling to mind the emergence of a reading public in the 19th Century. It’s worth remembering that Habermas’s careful study of the emergence of this public sphere was a study of the emergence of a bourgeois public sphere. Likewise, we need to keep in mind that the writing public that Yancey identifies might be better positioned as a new bourgeois writing public…or some such formulation…given that there is a high access bar when it comes to affording and becoming fluent in digital literacies. Nonetheless, I do think the attention Yancey is drawing to a fundamental shift in literacy practices is critical to engage as composition and rhetoric folks.

What I find critical is the fact that Yancey wants us to pay attention to (calling to mind Cindy Selfe and Gail Hawisher) the fact that emerging literacies and emerging writing publics did not need our ask for our (compositionists) advice. Like Habermas’s publics, they did not ask for permission (which reminds me once again how right Harry Cleaver is in his re-reading of Marx’s understanding of capital as a social relation). As Yancey argues,

like the members of the newly developed reading public, the members of the writing public have learned–in this case, to write, to think together, to organize, and to act withing these forums–largely without instruction and, more to the point here, largely without our instruction (301).

Yancey argues that if we are to recognize and take seriously the kind of seismic shift the emergence of these writing publics represent and the kind of composing they are doing, not only do we need to think differently about the kind of writing we do in the classroom, we also have to rethink what we mean by writing and composition. As as of this writing, for what it’s worth, I think she’s right.

Then the question: What is to be done?

And here is where we return to Scott’s concern with labor. Our current two-tiered (or three-tiered once you start making a distinction between “adjuncts” and “term appointment” faculty) system, after all, is the industrial model of literacy instruction, or better, how the previous “print revolution” was institutionalized. If we don’t listen to Scott, we will, for sure, repeat the pattern for our post-industrial institutionalization of these emerging writing publics. However, Scott’s response to Yancey could be read as a defense of the current system–or, worse, a desire to hold on to a nostalgic vision of the past. Anyone who works in the labor movement is all to familiar with this charge.

What I want to suggest is that the question we need to be asking–proactively–is how to construct a curriculum that articulates curricular change with equitable labor conditions? Or better, how can we “see” through a lens that does not pit labor against curriculum, scholarship, and ideas? In my mind, Yancey poses a problem for us–in the Freirian sense. If we are to accept our creative capacities (again, Cleaver’s summary of the development of an autonomous marxist tradition in the introduction to Reading Capital Politically is floating through my brain), then it becomes important to enact those creative capacities in our critiques as a discursive practice of solidarity. That is, if I am compelled by Yancey’s argument enough to entertain the implications of her argument (and I believe Scott is), then I can join with her in generating possible ways of organizing our response. Instead of only drawing attention to the gaps and silences, I could be compelled to deepen the discussion.

Now, you might object that Scott does this through his suggestion that we consider dropping the first-year course. However, in my mind that suggestion only reproduces the labor problem that he draws attention to, as I argued earlier, by effectively outsourcing the labor of first-year composition to high schools or, more likely, private companies.

It would be more productive to say, “hey, I like what you have to say, but I have some concerns about reproducing a tiered labor system. Let’s see if we can strategies about how to both respond to these new developments and rectify labor inequities all at once. Not “both/and,” but rather “as one,” that is, as they actually exist–interconnected, inseparable, organically linked. That’s interesting.

So, that’s got me thinking about concrete, programmatic approaches to Yancey’s article. At some point I hope to share some of these ideas here…even as I know that my current idea buds will look very different as I work through this more. But, realizing that I am writing too much again, I’ll stop for the moment :-). I need to go and check out InkWork.