Berlin, James A. Rhetorics, Poetics, and Cultures : Refiguring College English Studies. Urbana, Ill.: National Council of Teachers of English, 1996.
Introduction
The influence of structuralist and poststructuralist theories in the humanities, social sciences, and even the sciences—what Jameson has called the linguistic turn—can be seen as an effort to recover the tools of rhetoric in discussing the material effects of language in the conduct of human affairs. (xvii)
“The linguistic turn”…. note the “killer dichotomy.” How does AB’s triadicity queer this dichotomy and resist “novomania”? Berlin chooses to cast his gaze outward, to “society,” identifying social material conditions, relationships, hierarchies as affecting and being affected by literacy transactions. (I’m reminded here of Brandt’s ‘sponsors’…). Because AB’s ideology, though copacetic in many ways with Berlin’s, roots in literary tradition (ala Richards, Coleridge, Pierce, etc.) and turns the gaze inward (while simultaneously accounting for ‘outward’ and the social, via the interpretant), he dismisses her ideas. If I had to assign them body parts AB would be the head/heart; JB would be the skin/mouth/hands.
The structuralist and poststructuralist influence can thus be seen as an effort to recover the view from rhetoric, the perspective that reveals language to be a set of terministic screens, to recall Kenneth Burke, that constructs rather than records the signified.
But what of ‘culture’?
Throughout the 1980’s and into the 1990’s, what to make of the term culture has been one of the most conspicuous arenas of debate in education….Culture thus resides in a certain aesthetic experience regarded as transhistorical, imparting immutable values to all people in all places and times. As such, it transcends the ephemeral concerns of economics and politics, addressing instead the universal and eternal in human nature. (xviii)
AB resists this debate. It’s beside the point. But we see here Berlin identifying economics and politics as key dimension of “culture” and the experience of education, arguing it needs to be considered when revising views of literacy and literacy education. But perhaps one of Berlin’s objections, at this point, to AB is his understanding of “human nature.” Here, conception of culture as reflecting “universal and eternal” in human nature leads to impoverished literacy education. These underlying assumptions about human nature are pitted against what is “real” and valuable to Berlin.
This idea of culture as lived experience has subsequently been altered in response to the linguistic challenge to the humanities posed by structuralism and poststructuralism. With this challenge, culture is seen not simply as lived activity, but as the mediations of lived activity by language.
**”mediation” here… Does language “convey” activity or contain it? Or does language itself act? Outwardly (social) we can track the way language acts (ANT), affects change, transforms. Inwardly we can’t. We can’t measure this. Think aloud protocols… eh.
In other words, culture is a set of historically variable signifying practices characteristic of diverse social groups…Thus, culture is both signifying practices that represent experience in rhetoric, myth, and literature and the relatively independent responses of human agents to concrete economic, social, and political conditions (Johnson 1986-87). It is, once again, a polysemic and multilayered category, best considered in the plural. (xix)
What is meant by “signifying practices”? Can we make this distinction between social or group “practices” and individual “signifying practices” in a triadic conception of signification?
Part I: Historical Background
Chapter One
This section considers several historical accounts of English studies at the collegiate level: Raymond Williams’ Marxism in Literature (1977), Gerald Graff’s Professing Literature: An Institutional History (1987) , Pierre Bourdieu’s Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (1984), and Robert Scholes’ Textual Power (1985). Berlin identifies what he calls the poetic/rhetoric dichotomy, entrenched in the politics and conceptions of English departments historically, as toxic: “These texts and practices [stemming from a values system shaped by the poetic/rhetoric divide] are designed to reinforce the cultural hegemony of certain class, race, and gender groups at a time when this hegemony is being challenged in the daily encounters of ordinary citizens—citizens who inhabit a disparate array of cultural spaces” (xx). Berlin claims that Graff “implicitly endorses the analysis of the poetic-rhetoric binary that Willliams offers while denying its origins in social class.” Berlin, in part 1, lays the groundwork for establishing the roots of this toxic poetic/rhetoric binary in social class. This is his outward gaze. ABs work (as does Freire’s) merely adds dimension to Berlin’s work, seems to me. But it is an essential and foundational dimension; without cultivating within individuals an awareness of that and how they deploy language (and other forms) to make meaning FIRST, Berlin’s work is rendered weaker than it could be.
Some interesting quotations:
10: “Graff earlier locates the same set of contrasts between culture and nature in the work of I.A. Richards and Paul de Man…” ***What does Graff say about Richards?
11: “It is remarkable, however, to discover that Bourdieu located inscribed within French class relations the same binary oppositions regarding culture described by Williams in his historical study and by Graff in his investigation of academic literary criticism in the United States.” ***Remarkable how? Perhaps he’s only “seeing” in binary mode?
11: “Bourdieu discovered that a ‘work of art has meaning and interest only for someone who possesses the cultural competence, that is, the code into which it is encoded’ (2).” ***Uh… I see where this comes from, but it makes me itch. Meaning is static here, determined by the artist and imposed upon the work of art, the symbol. Experience itself becomes a matter of decoding. (tongue spitter emoji). (Truth/Knowledge ‘out there,’ not ‘both/and’?). That level of meaning exists, of course, but there are other levels of meaning, not the least of which is determined by the perhaps-utterly-unacculturated individual “viewer.” Who is to say that individual’s meaning making is wrong or false? How does the notion of the interpretant intercede?
11: “Furthermore, this code is always historically specific. At present, the code is constituted by a set of opposing terms corresponding to the distinction between high culture and low culture, higher class and lower class. The first of these is the separation of form from function: ‘the primacy of the mode of representation over the object of representation demands categorically an attention to form which previous art only demanded conditionally’ (3).” ***Berlin uses the binary in this section to suggest a particular problem with it (ignores that English “reinforces” the binary in the service of hegemonic forces). Makes sense that Berlin would look elsewhere from AB’s work as her work refuses the binary. This work embraces the binary to critique it; uses the binary to forge stronger literacy instruction in the service of social justice.
13: “What is important is the way the texts are interpreted and used, not the texts themselves. Indeed, Bourdieu is himself mistaken in arguing for a particular version of the aesthetic as a constitutive element of the structure of social class. Aesthetic responses and the texts that evoke them are more accurately seen as appropriations in the service of class interests, reinforcing rather than creating differences more accurately attributed to economic and political categories.” ***This, I think, is so important and right and good. I wonder if Berlin’s experience of F/T/W stayed with him over the years, or if he jettisoned his appreciation for that work in pursuit of this work, and why if so he felt compelled to do it? (I’m sure there’s no moment. No event to mark this. Still… such a sharp change between 82 and 90, and now this…)
14: “Scholes notes that ‘actual non-literature is perceived as grounded in the realities of existence, where it is produced in response to personal or socioeconomic imperatives and therefore justifies itself functionally. By its very usefulness, its non-literariness, it eludes our grasp. It can be read but not interpreted, because it supposedly lacks those secret-hidden-deeper meanings so dear to our pedagogic hearts’ (6). Furthermore, the production of these non-literary texts cannot be taught apart from the exigencies of real-life situations, so that the field of composition is a sort of ‘pseudo-non-literature,’ just as the attempt to teach creative writing in the academy is an effort to produce ‘pseudo-literature,’ the product of attempting to teach what cannot be taught. Finally, Scholes uses this governing scheme of oppositions to characterize English department practices along the same lines seen inWilliams and Bourdieu: the division between sacred and profane tests, the boundary between the priestly class and the menial class, the placing of beauty and truth against the utilitarian and commonplace.” ***Okay. First, this conception of interpretation surely doesn’t come from linguistics. Interpretation isn’t the same on this level. We aren’t talking about semiotics. Berthoff and Freire recognize the sociopolitical implications of teaching literacy at the level of semiotics (Peircean, triadic). Also, all of this reminds me of AB’s use of Vygotsky’s “pseudo-concepts’…
14: “Scholes’s work is an intelligent and comprehensive attempt to address the destructively decisive oppositional categories on which practices in the college English department are based.” ***One can say the same of Berlin’s work and the same of AB’s work, too (and likely that of others).
14: “Scholes invokes the deconstructive challenge to these practices from Paul de Man… (ala Eagleton and Jameson). Yet he refuses to see texts as radically indeterminate [deconstructionists… Are they? Not in AB’s POV. Triadic hermeneutics embraces probability and a sense of satisfying, recognizable understanding possible through communciation] and finally aesthetic [TASTE? or lived experience?]…while denying that they are unremittingly political [as Berlin would have him do]…Instead, he argues for the multiple determination of texts depending on the semiotic codes—that is, cultural codes—located in them through the specific set of reading practices invoked in their consideration. In other words, texts can mean many things depending on the codes applied to them as well as the codes inscribed in them, the two acting dialogically. Their polysemic meanings are the product of this interactive process.”
***What “two” things are acting dialogically? “Codes” applied (by reader), “codes” inscribed (by writer)…. By ‘codes’ he means system of signification (referent/symbol). But the third… I need the curious triangle:
(I’ve input “medium” here.)
The “reference” is the thing (concept/term/idea) we are thinking with (Sense 3). Yes, I think here is an important point of common ground between Berlin and AB: For AB, the Interpretant is social-epistemic; it is the reader applying “code” learned from experience. This understanding of signification is deeply political, not because it accounts for the social as essential to meaning making (for both producer and consumer of text), but because it centralizes personal experience (not education or any particular acculturation) as key to meaning making. “We think not just about meanings but with them” (Sense 3). Berlin and AB seem to stand together in this valuing of “the political” (as Berlin would call it).
The Scholes account illustrates meaning-making in binary terms, leaving out “the third,” though leaving space for it by not speaking to where the reader gains his “code.” Berlin identifies this as a “shortcoming,” noting that anyone can “choose a code” (an “interpretant”); “The choice of interpretive strategies—the code preferred in a particular reading, whether political or aesthetic or historical, for example—seems arbitrary” (14). It isn’t; it’s socio-personal.
Here the goal seems to be “correct interpretation of a literary text,” and it is; historically, English departments are oriented towards this pedagogical goal at the time of Scholes’ writing (1986). (And maybe they still are??). Berlin’s scholarship works against this current-traditional conception of English studies by insisting on the equal value of rhetorical texts in the practice of interpretation?
Scholes mentions nothing about the production of rhetorical texts—that is, the teaching of writing—assuming in the manner of those he opposes that learning to interpret literature will automatically teach students to master the methods of producing non-literary discourse. (15)
I find the equating of “rhetorical texts”—meaning pragmatic, non-literary texts—with “the teaching of writing” a red-flag divergence in values between Berlin and AB. Berlin identifies a problem in this chapter, one AB would agree exists, I think. But Berlin goes the way of celebrating “the production of rhetorical texts,” via theory (particularly Marxism and/or poststructuralism), calling for the teaching of non-literary texts and writing as intellectual practice.
But Berlin seems to appropriate the “killer dichotomy,” claiming as valuable “rhetoric” over aesthetic texts, contributing, perhaps, to the lit/cw/rhet divide that exists so intensely now. Maybe later he’ll offer his own “third.”
…the English department both serves as important exclusionary function and mystifies the role it plays in precluding reading and writing practices that might address inequalities in the existing social order. In other words, by excluding reading practices that might discover the political unconscious of literary texts and by refusing to take seriously the production and interpretation of rhetorical texts that address political matters, English studies has served as a powerful conservative force, all the while insisting on its transcendence of the political. The enforcement of this invidious division of the literary from the non-literary has served to entitle those already entitled and to disempower the disempowered, doing so in the name of the sacred literary text.
AB will not shun the literary text. She embraces it as no more toxic, or not, than any other kind of text. Her focus isn’t on WHAT we teach but HOW we teach it. And in her view, we are apt to teach “political” or “rhetorical” texts—interpretation or production—just as badly as we are any kind of text. Valuing a different kind of text (even multimodal, digital… ANY medium) will make not a lick of difference in our success as writing teachers. Because writing is making meaning; and reading is making meaning; all composing is meaning-making; all “reading” (listening, seeing, feeling) is meaning-making. She shares Berlin’s values, but he’s treading ground; she’s digging down.
Chapter Two
18: “A college curriculum is a device for encouraging the production of a certain kind of graduate, in effect, a certain kind of person.” **”Device” is a key term here; focus on hegemony.
“In the nineteenth century, the college curriculum in the United States was monolithic and relatively uniform throughout the country. A college education was intended to prepare students—overwhelmingly white males until late in the century—for law, the ministry, and politics.”
19: “…higher education’s mission was to prepare civic and moral leaders (most colleges were church-affiliated), not technicians.”
“The major cause of the changes [last 25 years of the century] was the shift from entrepreneurial to corporate capitalism.”
“Gradually the small liberal arts college was replaced by the research university.”
“One of the central elements…to the new research university was the emergence of English—an area of study that simply did not exist in the old curriculum—as a disciplinary formation.” **Notice: “English” means “English Literature”?
20: “…serious research in literature—and then without benefit of university status—began only with the Tudors in the 1560’s.”
Parker: “English departments exist because literary texts exist.”
“Parker thus works hared to dissever the task of teaching text production from that of teachign literary interpretation, doing so despite all the evidence to the contrary (see Berlin 1987)…”
21: “Parker describes the following elements as operative in defeating the classical curriculum: ‘There were the impact of science, the American spirit of utilitarianism or pragmatism, and the exciting, new dream of democratic, popular education, an assumed corollary of which was the free elective system’ (11). He adds a fourth factor as well: ‘ a widespread mood of questioning and experimentation in education, a practical, revisionary spirit that challenged all traditions and accepted practices’ (11).”
“English studies is a highly overdetermined institutional formation, occupying a site at the center of converging economic, social, political, and cultural developments as the end of the nineteenth century, developments that continue to affect it today.”
22: “The professionalization of English studies in schools and colleges was also inextricably involved in the drive for equality of opportunity among women, as many of the new state universities adopted gender-equal admissions policies.”
22: “During most of the nineteenth century, the path to economic success could be found in entrepreneurial activities…By the 1890’s, this dream was increasingly unattainable.”
“Success for the middle class was redefined in relation to educational accomplishment.”
23: “As Joel Spring (1986) has indicated, “schooling as a means of developing human capital has become the most important goal of the educational system in the twentieth century’ (185).” ***What happens we when don’t need that “human capital”? Or does what we consider “human capital” change? Our current situation? dilemma?
“In keeping with the invention of adolescence as a distinct life stage, the high school created a youth culture and organized student behavior around the principle of ‘social efficiency’ (Spring 1986, 198).”
23: ” The passage of the Morill Land Grant Act in 1862 began the use of federal funds for public education.”
24: “In thirty years, the number of institutions had nearly doubled, and the number of faculty quadrupled…”
“By 1917, 38 states had introduced compulsory schooling until age 16…” ***Kindergarten
“Many states introduced laws preventing immigrants from setting up schools that conducted instruction in their native language…”
25: “…school systems realized that they could save money by hiring women, since they could pay them less without fear of opposition.”
“As Sue Ellen Holbrook (1991) has argued, there was a markedly defensive effort among college teachers during the early years of English studies to characterize their study of language and literature as a manly enterprise, hoping thereby to keep it safe from the incursion of women.”
26: “The masculinizing of English studies relates directly to the establishment of the literary texts that were to serve as the basis for study in English courses.”
28: “My purpose is to offer a sketch that will support my stand on ways English studies serves larger economic, social, and political objectives.”
29: “Rhetorical accomplishment acquired through direct instruction in the college classroom had always been an important fixture of the college curriculum in the United States, and it maintained a place in the new English studies.”
“As I indicated earlier, a poetic and a rhetoric tend to appear together, the one giving significance to the other through a division of textual labor.”
“The point I wish to make is that while the domains of rhetoric and poetic are historically variable, these domains are usually established as a function of their relation to each other.” ***Note: but not stemming from a common place of opportunity for pedagogical attention.
Three paradigms: “Literacy for the Scientific Meritocracy,” “The Literacy of Liberal Culture,” “Democratic Culture”
30: “At Harvard in 1897, it [first year composition] was the only course that all students had to take.”
“Text production for the new scientific meritocracy has come to be called current-traditional rhetoric, a tribute to its prominence over the last hundred years.”
“Current-traditional rhetoric does not deal with probabilities…but with certainties ascertained through the scientific method.” **Positivist.
31: “This rhetoric forwards the correspondence theory of language. The linguistic sign is seen as an arbitrary invention devised to communicate exactly the external reality to which it corresponds. Writing becomes a matter of matching word to referent in a manner that evokes in the mind of the reader the experience of the referent itself. This rhetoric accordingly emphasizes four modes of discourse—narration, description, exposition, and argument—each of which is thought to correspond to a different faculty of the mind.” ***Wow. This is still taught. Particularly in lower grades.
“The literary criticism forwarded as the counterpart to this rhetoric was philology. Philology, of course, originated in Germany in response to the study of the language and literature of ancient Greece and Rome.”
“Its other major preoccupation was the search for historical facts surrounding the creation of the literary text. Literary study thus became data-gathering rather than literary or cultural interpretation…This material was to be memorized and reproduced for exams.”
32: “It is not difficult to detect the ideological commitments that underwrote this conception of literacy. From this view, the real is always factual and rational. The answer to all questions—scientific, social, political, cultural—can be found unproblematically in the facts of the material world.” ***Positivism
33: “…there was a common core of liberal and humane ideas that all college graduates should share.”
“From this position, writing is a manifestation of one’s spiritual nature.”
“This group embraced a philosophical idealism similar to Emerson’s emphasis on the spiritual in human affairs without his commitment to democracy. Truth, beauty, and goodness are located in a transcendent realm beyond the material, an unchanging substratum only partially, although progressively, unveiled on earth. The act of revelation is performed by the gifted seer in philosophy, politics, or art.” **Phaedrus.
35: “…by WWI, the two schools came to look very much alike, both pledging allegiance to a democratic meritocracy while upholding the time-tested values of background and breeding in their admissions policies.”
Democratic Literacy
35: “The social-democratic conception of rhetoric and poetic arose in response to the political progressivism that was an especially potent force int eh Midwest…” **Dewey, Chicago/Michigan
“This position agreed that universities should provide a group of trained experts to solve economic and social problems. These experts, however, existed to serve society as a whole, not their own narrow class interests.”
36: “This conception of literacy is the most committed to egalitarianism in matters of race, gender, and class…”
“Rhetoric in college should focus on training citizens for participation in a democracy.”
“Students learn to write in a manner that will prepare them for participation in the political life of a democratic society.”
37: “Of course key to this effort is the extension of free education for all. The social theories of John Dewey best represent this comprehensive version of democratic literacy.”
38: critique of Democratic literacy: “This view unfortunately displays an excessive faith in existing democratic procedures and an innocence about economic realities and their effects on politics…This view does not adequately take into account the effects of economic and social arrangements—for example, ,the conflicts of capitalism and the existence of unjust class, gender, and class relations.”
The Continuity of the Curriculum
38: “…the curriculum failed to provide a stable core of general studies that unified the educational experience of students.”
39: “For most of the twentieth century, a college degree has been a ticket to prosperity.”
“…the common core curriculum was simultaneously abandoned—so that by 1897, the only required course for all students at bellweather Harvard was first-year composition.”
“At times, this course did try to bring an organizing force to bear; proposing a sense of common values along with instruction in writing (see Berlin 1987).”
40: 1970 this changed. Economics changed. Fordist to post-fordist “nodes of production”… colleges and universities now inadequate to prepare students for the new needs of the workforce…
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