Clinamen

School starts today. I didn't do nearly as much writing as I would have liked to over the summer, but I did a fair amount of reading. Among the books I read were Thomas Rickert's Acts of Enjoyment: Rhetoric, Zizek, and the Return of the Subject and Jeff Rice's The Rhetoric of Cool: Composition Studies and New Media. I initially decided to read these two books because they were new contributions to Rhetoric and Composition, but it turns out that they had some interesting overlaps.

Rickert's project is an intriguing one. He begins the book with a dilemma that would make just about any rhetoric and writing teacher take a step back. Toward the end of the 1990s, Rickert started to notice something strange about his composition students:

"My students were becoming adept at picking apart ads and identifying their most pernicious features: the inducement to buy unnecessary, expensive items; the achievement of identity and modes of being through products; the reification of unjust class, race, and gender roles; and so forth. I faced little resistance from them, James Berlin and Company to the contrary. Or perhaps I should say their resistance appeared indirectly, in odd, hard to recognize, even symptomatic forms. Their adeptness led them to write competent, even excellent papers, but that was the extent of it. If there was any real change, it was in growing cynicism: 'Yeah, I know I don't need these seventy-five-dollar designer blue jeans, but...' [spending ensues]. Where was the connection between what they were learning and their actual lives?" (1-2)

Rickert's framing of the problem is clear and elegant, and it made me immediately question my own teaching practices. How might we make sense of the "fault line between knowledge and action" (2)? Rickert turns to Slavoj Zizek and theories of enjoyment, fantasy, and jouissance to understand the limits of a cultural studies approach to teaching rhetoric and writing. He takes us through detailed engagements with the "big shots" of the field (Jim Berlin especially) and moves toward a theory of the "act" - something that would move beyond mere "critique":

"The Act is interested in rupturing the day, in transforming the entire discursive field that determines what is proper and valued. The Act refuses accommodation in favor of radical transformation despite the risk of total loss. Ultimately, this is what most pedagogies refuse to do: they do not teach 'risk' ('Godless' 561). Even the most radical pedagogies, which would wage war on capital itself, betray the servitude that underwrites their success: 'ifyou do this, then this will happen; if you plan ahead, you will save time; if you are critical of power, you will be empowered'" (194).

Rickert's question is a powerful one: How do we move beyond a cultural studies approach that does little upset things? He admits that his answer - a pedagogy of the Act - is not specific one, but he is not looking to institute a program. Instead, he is looking for rhetoric and composition to rethink the very assumptions of pedagogy.

What I have provided here is a very brief sketch of Rickert's argument, but it feeds nicely into Rice's book. Rice may very well perform something close to what Rickert calls for.

Rice's The Rhetoric of Cool continues Gregory Ulmer's project of inventing electracy, a project that Ulmer has worked through in numerous texts including Applied Grammatology, Tele-Theory, Internet Invention, and Electronic Monuments. A student of Ulmer's (the book begins with a Foreword by Ulmer), Rice works very much in his mentor's mode by excavating the ground beneath the term "cool." Thus, Rice is not necessarily trying to make composition "cool," but is instead searching the term for it's various, disparate meanings. This search allows him a way into a conversation about new media and composition studies.

Rice returns to 1963 and the birth of composition studies to recover some of the paths not taken by our discipline. Thus, he asks why when theorists like Albert Kitzhaber were "inventing" modern composition studies certain artists and musicians were left out of the conversation. Why not consider artists such as Warhol or authors such as Burroughs when developing theories of composition? Rice argues that these figures have been left out of the conversation as composition has put together a grand narrative of the discipline. That grand narrative is mostly concerned with civic literacy and democracy, and (on some level) it depends upon the exclusion of certain theories.

Rice asks the discipline to abandon this grand narrative and to consider what has been left out. Further, he asks the sub-discipline of computers and writing to reconsider its goals. Instead of nuts-and-bolts considerations of technology, Rice wants inventions (and reinventions) of whole new ways of thinking (whole new "electracies.") Instead of asking how we can use a tool like Photoshop in a writing classroom, Rice encourages us to think about teaching students to write with images. This would be beyond writing about images - it would be an expansion of the definition of Writing to include various media. Film making is writing. Podcasting is writing. Hyperlinking is writing.

Here might be where Rice's project answers Rickert's. Rice calls for rhetoric and composition to move beyond the literate enterprise toward an electrate one. This will require (and here is where he most echoes Ulmer) invention, but not invention in the way Aristotle uses the term and certainly not invention in the way that "inventors" use the term (i.e. creating something from scratch.) Instead, Rice wants in in(ter)vention that produces new ways of reading and writing. This would mean teaching students how to appropriate texts, how to see various shades of meaning, and how to make remake meaning.

It seems that Rice, like Rickert, is frustrated with any pedagogy that stops at mere critique and stops at the boundaries of literate practice. Maybe these two books are an indication of some future strands of rhetoric and composition scholarship - strands that will ask how we can think about the next phase of our research and pedagogy.