John Trimbur on Richard Rorty

John Trimbur expresses his distaste for Richard Rorty’s concept of the Abnormal Discourse with this bear of a sentence:

At just the point where we could name the conversation and its underlying consensus as a technology of power and ask how its practices enable and constrain the production of knowledge, privilege and exclude forms of discourse, set its agenda by ignoring or suppressing others, Rorty builds a self-correcting mechanism into the conversation, an invisible hand to keep the discourse circulating and things from going stale.

This is the role of the professional rabble rouser. I know. I am one. I follow Buddha, Socrates, Nietzsche. This world is starving for polemics! There are too many sacred cows. The human conversation is dying. Someone needs to stand up and raise arguments, question self appointed authority, start some controversy.

I’ll start one. I think the attempt to formulate writing instruction is woefully misguided. I believe that truly effective writing instruction—whatever that is—can only be done in a one on one conversation. I believe this is a necessary first step to an eventual writing community.

Thrusting unsure writers into a peer group is traumatizing. At best this “throwing them into the pool” theory of writing instruction doesn’t work, and, at worst, it leads to these obsessive attempts at codifying and leveling. Human life is unfair and imbalanced. How can a classroom not be?

For example, Trimbur’s argument:

Rorty’s view of abnormal discourse is, I think, a problematical one. On one hand, it identifies abnormal discourse with a romantic realm of thinking the unthinkable, of solitary voices calling out, of the imagination cutting against the grain. In keeping with this romantic figure of thought, Rorty makes abnormal discourse the activity par excellence not of the group but of the individual-the genius, the rebel, the fool, “someone . . . who is ignorant of … conventions or sets them aside.” This side of abnormal discourse, moreover, resists formulation. There is, Rorty says, “no discipline which describes it, any more than there is a discipline devoted to a study of the unpredictable, or of ‘creativity'” (Philosophy 320). It is simply “generated by free and leisured conversation . . . as the sparks fly up” (321).

Did you miss that very important point? Here it is: “This side of abnormal discourse resists formulation.”

Trimbur accuses Rorty of “keeping with [a] Romantic Discourse,” yet he clings to a scientific discourse that insists on formulating everything. Maybe some things are just ineffable.

[Great! See, now I’m stuck in the Romantic Discourse. Just lovely.]

But I digress. My questions:

• Isn’t Trimbur trying to impose his discourse on Rorty by insisting that writing pedagogy be precisely formulizable so it can be packaged and delivered to classrooms across the world?

• Have we really lost this much respect for individual writing processes?

• Are we truly unable to give beginning writers one on one instruction, or is it simply too expensive?

• If it is about money, shouldn’t we be writing and complaining about that?

Just my humble thoughts as a burgeoning scholar.

Citation

“Consensus and Difference in Collaborative Learning”
Author(s): John Trimbur
Source: College English, Vol. 51, No. 6 (Oct., 1989), pp. 602-616
Published by: National Council of Teachers of English
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/377955
Accessed: 30/01/2010 14:33

Charles Bivona/Erec Smith

Charles Bivona: Here are some of my thoughts. The Buddhist composition instructor strives to develop pedagogical compassion and empathy. Compassion for what these struggling novice writers are enduring, and sincere empathy born from sharing in that struggle.

Yes, if one wants to teach writing, one must always be writing. One can not sell a practice, a state of mind, without believing in it. A writing instructor who doesn’t write every day is tantamount to a proselytizing Catholic who never goes to church, a dancing instructor who never dances, a chef who avoids the stove.

Am I wrong?

Erec Smith: No, you are not wrong, but your simile toward the end proves that “practicing what you preach” isn’t just a Buddhist moral.  The way you begin this, with Buddhist composition instructor’s compassion and empathy to help struggling writers, is indicative of the role of a bodhisattva, that spiritually endowed person who puts his or her own spiritual enlightenment on hold in order to help others. What can you do with that?

Charles Bivona: What the bodhisattva metaphor leads to is the argument that only world class writers should teach writing, no?  The bodhisattva postpones his own enlightenment, stops short of moving into complete Buddha consciousness.  The bodhisattva postpones Buddhahood out of sheer compassion for others.  I assume it has something to do with the human capacity for socialization.  I mean, if I discovered the method to instant enlightenment, Erec, I would at least have to dash you off some email instructions before my consciousness became one with everything.  So my question is this: what “enlightenment” are we, as writing instructors/bodhisattvas, putting on hold in order to help our students? The answer, to me, seems to be, we are postponing being professional writers.  So, writing instructors  should at least have the potential to be a professional writer, but at best be someone who is trying to write professionally on a part-time basis.  Does that sound right?

Teach Your Students How to Conceptualize, Man!

Sang was on a roll, again.  “You don’t just give them a handful of knowledge,” he said, “some fucking check list of ‘real world skills.’ You make them understand why they should care about what you’re teaching.”  He loved to explain my own teaching to me.  I loved to hear it.  He always articulated my pedagogy better than I ever could.

“You give them the big picture and the larger concepts of life.  Then you show them how being a good writer empowers them in this conceptual world.  Good writers can manipulate concepts, and the world is made of concepts.  It isn’t a big leap from there: good writing is power.  Once they realize that, they want it.  In other words, you give their studies a purpose.”  He puffed on his cigarette for dramatic pause—he taught me the art of the dramatic pause—before he continued. “There was no sense of purpose for any of these students, before they met you.”

He was right about one thing: most of my students seemed to lack purpose.  I asked a room full of freshman what they were passionate about, and was answered with blank stares.  I asked if any of them loved to do anything. I love to write, I offered as an example.  The use of the word love always throws them.  No one responded.  So I asked—falling back on my job training—who at least liked to write. Confusion.  Eventually I got to the truth.  These young people hated writing.  Unless they are texting, IMing, Twittering, Facebooking, blogging, or emailing, they absolutely despise expressing themselves in words.

My students are constantly writing.  But that’s different, they say.  Many of them have been communicating in written text their entire lives.  They grew up in chat rooms, and sending IMs.  They moved into text messaging and facebook status updates — a study of facebook status updates can reveal a thorough narrative of some people’s lives.  Now Twitter has them producing situational American Haiku.  The writing prompt: What are you doing?

You should read them sometime.  Our students are composing their own literature and we are too stuffy and behind the times to notice.  What we do is worse than our parents hating our music.  We are demanding that they express themselves our way, and they aren’t listening.  Our students are producing a written transcript of our culture, and they are doing this at an alarming rate.  They are leaving a real time textual record of the consciousness of millions — archived by time and date.  Maybe some those of us who specialize in language should stop pushing old forms and start looking into this literary occurrence.

What would Samuel Johnson do?

Rescue the Good from the Bad

Sometimes you have to save your last two paragraphs and junk the rest.  The entire paper is a warm up for you to write those excellent last two paragraphs.  Don’t feel a second of discouragement.  This is normal.  Now take those two paragraphs and build your paper around them.  If from that revision you write two more paragraphs that are just as good, now you have four.  Keep those four and discard the rest.  Repeat this process until you have a complete paper.

I know it sounds time consuming, but the more you do it, the faster you will get.  And then you will be able to communicate with anyone, at any time.  Is there anything else worth learning how to do?