Derek has started a "CCCarnival" for Karen Kopelson's recent article in College Composition and Communication, and I'm using it as an excuse to stop the process of moving/unpacking. Put in the terms of Kopelson's discussion, I'm taking a break from "practice" to do some "theory." In responding to this piece, I'd like to focus on two things: the discussion of "new converts" to Rhet/Comp and the discussion of how Rhet/Comp "borrows" most (if not all) of its theory.

First, I'm glad this kind of research is happening. This article is really well written and, in my mind, extremely necessary given the "splits" we see between different generations of Rhet/Comp scholars. Regardless of Kopelson's concern that Rhet/Comp is obsessed with itself and that it publishes too much "Who/What are we?" research, this kind of scholarship needs to continue. Like many graduate students, I experience the fall-out of "the split" of "English" and Rhet/Comp every day. At conferences, in committee meetings, or even in graduate seminars, I am constantly reminded that the generations of scholars preceding me have fought it out to define Rhet/Comp as something more than a service discipline.

With that being said, I'm not sure how I feel about being labeled a "new convert" by Kopelson. This is her term for those coming to Rhet/Comp to pursue interdisciplinary work or to connect "research" with "pedagogy." This rhetoric of conversion is discussed extensively by Kopelson as she points to the published conversion narratives of people like Joseph Harris and Ross Winterowd. But she doesn't necessarily question this rhetoric. That is, she is aware that this grand narrative is circulating, but she doesn't go into much detail about what it's covering over. Kopelson argues that as the discipline gains more "converts" it continues to grapple with its identity. This is most certainly happening. Part of Kopelson's argument is that such grappling is somewhat counterproductive and can get in the way of other important questions:

"the costs are indeed high when self-scrutiny comes at the expense of taking up other critical concerns and of making other, more innovative and far-reaching forms of knowledge" (775).

I don't disagree. Rhet/Comp needs to discuss both our disciplinary identities (incidentally, I'm surprised that Kopelson doesn't cite Steve Mailloux's Disciplinary Identities) and broader scholarly questions.[*] However, before we skip past anything too quickly, I'd like to question this rhetoric of "conversion" and what it says about the community of Rhet/Comp. What does it mean when we refer to new scholars in Rhet/Comp as converts? It seems to me that such rhetorics reveal a desire to circle the wagons and create a coherent community. What are the ethical implications of such a drive for coherence? Indeed, to borrow one of Kopelson's terms, how "responsible" is such a move? What gets left out in the push to define the discipline? Kopelson points us to statements that composition studies is a "less unified and more contentious discipline now than it was in 1990" (Fulkerson qtd. in Kopelson 773). As she notes, it's not difficult to find such arguments. And Kopelson seems to be arguing that we should move beyond them to focus on the other work of composition. That is, she hopes that the discipline can go "do rhetoric" or "do composition" rather than worrying about who/what we are.

But in an attempt to push past disciplinary identity crises, we might fall into a trap. That trap would too easily posit a "coherent" discipline as good or desirable. A rhetoric of "conversion" participates in the attempts create a coherent discipline, and it can tend to ignore the usefulness of a disparate, shifting community. In fact, it can tend to ignore that all communities are disparate and shifting, and that attempts to circle the wagons are always a response to such shifting.

A great deal of recent work (Rice, Rickert, Hawk) has begun to question the drive to continually "discipline-ize" Rhet/Comp. These scholars recognize that people like James Berlin needed to define Rhet/Comp in the face of challenges and questions from other departments and disciplines. However, these scholars also ask us to now move beyond such a need to circle the wagons. What else can the discipline be? How can it branch out? Rather than attempting to decide who is "in" and who is "out," we might accept the disparate nature of Rhet/Comp and not try to create a coherent community. Calling young scholars "new converts" seems to participate in an ongoing project of enculturation that aims to define an "us" against a "them." This process is entirely understandable and unavoidable - it is a natural disciplinary impulse. But we can and should question it.

And this brings me to a second argument in Kopelson's article - her discussion of Rhet/Comp's penchant for "borrowing." Kopelson (and most of the respondents to her survey) argue that Rhet/Comp doesn't really create its own theories. Rather, they say it borrows from elsewhere. The idea here is the Rhet/Comp borrows from "philosophy" or "cultural studies" rather than creating anything new. But such an argument assumes that there is such a thing as an "unborrowed" theory. When Zizek mashes together Lacan (psychoanalysis), Kierkegaard (philosophy), Damasio (cognitive science), and Melville (novelist) in The Parallax View, is he not borrowing? What theory is not "borrowed"? What discipline is completely sealed off from all others? It seems impossible to locate any theory in any discipline (biology borrows from chemistry, neuroscience borrows from psychology, etc.) that doesn't borrow. Thus, to say that we need to stop "borrowing" and start "creating" relies on the (mistaken) assumption that any theory (or any piece of writing, for that matter) can be "original."

And Kopelson's discussion of borrowing feeds directly back into her discussion of building a coherent community/discipline: