Berthoff, Ann E. “Rhetoric as hermeneutic.” College composition and communication 42.3 (1991): 279-287.
279: “Those who try to keep up with theory and practice as they are set forth in our journals might have another criticism: there is a great deal of pendulum-swinging. We go from sentence combining to free writing and back again to the formal outline; from vague notions of ‘pre-writing’ to vaguer notions of heuristics; from rigid rubrics to the idea of no writing at all. Some might celebrate this uncertainty as evidence of pluralism and a lack of dogmatism in the field, but it could also be characterized as a distracted, purposeless, despairing adhocism.” ***This is a scathing critique that resonates pointedly with the octolog, “Professing the New Rhetorics.” What strikes meIs how relevant this critique is today, Especially given the multimodal turnAnd the foray into digital media and pedagogy.Do we have a method?Do we have methods?Let’s stays the sameI’m on our approaches to teaching and digital spaces with digital tools?Is it working?And towards what?What is our purpose?And you are journals todayReflectOur purpose?
There is a good deal of discussion in the first part of this article about how Postmodern theories of language and current traditional theories of language are really “one and the same principle” (280).
“A dyadic semiotics has long determined the way we think about readers and writers and the texts they engage. It is generally held that we ‘have’ ideas or thoughts which we put it into language; we enjoy insights which we then ‘somehow’ clothe in words. This dyadic theory is fundamental to left-wing and right-wing pedagogies, K-35” (280).
“It is by now commonplace to observe that the Saussurian linguistics which has guided thinking about language for at least thirty years is positivist in its presuppositions about meaning, intention, reference, interpretation, and all the rest of that ‘mentalistic’ baggage. But it is not widely recognized, I find, that the practice known as ‘deconstruction,’ which has sought to supplant the old structuralism, derives from exactly the same premises, even when they are recognized and rejected. From the spiritless investigations of moribund theories of ‘structure’ to the golly-gee wonderment expressed by those embracing poststructuralist theory, committing themselves to a variety of postmodern ideologies and practices, the semiotics is the same. It is dyadic and whether its consequences are ridiculed or enthusiastically welcome, the master principle is the same: language is a substitute for reality. For the old positivists, reality is a territory to be mapped by language [that’s Whorf]; for the new positivists, it is another text. But the guiding theory of language is the same in both cases” (280).***This is probably the most clearly expressed and direct critique of Postmodernism from Berthoff that I have found. I really wonder what Bizzell thinks of this. PerhapsIt isAcceptableFor those who embrace postmodernistTheories of languageExplicitly or implicitlyFor that theory of language to be dyadic.Maybe for themThe consequenceIs not so disturbing. And maybe, too, the dyadic nature of postmodernist theories of language serves particular ideas well, like the notion of “discourse communities.” I don’t think its dyadic nature renders the idea less powerful or useful. But it also leaves Berthoff’s ideas rather untapped and underconsidered. This says something about the relationship between dyadicism and triadicity as they exist in our conversations (explicitly or implicitly); are they are mutually exclusive or merely just different dimensions of the experience of language theory and semiotics?
Berthoff seems to dismiss any idea that stems from a dyadic notion of the sign as bad (because incomplete and wrong?) because it distracts us from a kind of teaching that might liberate students from the oppressive state of uncritically being in the world of language and other signs. Yet she appreciates Elbow’s work and Bizzell’s. I don’t think her dismissal is as blanket as people make it out to be (meaning me?)…She’s just trying her darnedest to get people to look at the implications and potentiality packaged in the notion of triadic semiotics. As a field we are not doing that. At a time when it seems that digital media and multimodality is making our work “new and complex” (Writer/Designer, x), Berthoff’s work tells us that in a very, very important way it isn’t true. (See Palmeri’s assertion that ‘we’ have always been multimodal…). From an incredibly important point of view there is nothing particularly “new” or “complex” about teaching composition merely in using Web based technologies in the classroom, or inviting students to create multimodal projects, or in teaching them how to do that, when and why, or any of this in a writing class.
To think from a Berthovian point of view requires us to ask: What are we teaching in the first place, when we teach composition? It requires us to take very seriously the notion of a “new rhetoric” or a new pedagogy. In what way is our theory “new”? On what level? Is it really getting down to the heart of the matter, which is always—because we are teachers, or we are informing them—HUMANITY (Society/Community/Democracy, etc.)? Comp history tells us that there is often a stark and useful difference between “teaching writing” and “teaching students.” I tell my students all the time, “Remember: you are not your writing,” so that they might hear my feedback, my suggestions and questions, as “real” and not some passive aggressive way of telling them they’re sucky writers. “Teaching writing” (aka “teaching ‘multimodal composition'”) is “thingy” (as is teaching ‘discourse communities’ or ‘genre’ or ‘grammar, or ‘literature’). But I’m guessing that most of us get into this not-lucrative-in-any-possible-way profession because we love to teach people. Berthoff tells us that we English studies and language studies people, and semioticians, we possess in the declaration of this field of study perhaps the most hopeful, full-of-potential line of inquiry in the humanities. Our line of inquiry—if we bear down and dig all the way to the center—is epistemontological. Our line of inquiry is MIND. Mind in Action. Imagination.
“All texts are indeterminate: all reading is misreading; all interpretation is necessarily in error: such pronouncements are easily institutionalized, precisely because they’re founded on the same symbiotic principle as the concepts which they’re intended to supplant” (280). ***I think this is one of the amazingAspectsOf Montessori’s work.That it has survived, That it has become “institutionalized.”How did she do it?I wonder how much the materials themselvesThe physicality of themThe commercializ-able-ness of themHelped her work to take root, and take root again (at least in America). Seems to me Berthoff’s Theoretical orientationLeads toPedagogical practiceThat is not “easy to institutionalize.” Now that we are in the digital age, however, I wonder ifThis is necessarily trueAnymore.Could Burt toss pedagogical methodBecome instantiatedIn thingsThat can be Produced Reproduced Advertised Demonstrated Sold? FTW employs linguistic texts and invites the production of linguistic texts, But the potential stretches far beyond Composing In the linguistic mode.
“We are distracted from our mission, which should be to confront the problem of multiple illiteracies, first of all by supporting our colleagues in the schools as they begin to institute ethnographic approaches to reading and writing, learning with them what it means to begin with meaning” (281). ***Here she acknowledges the value of teaching writing via triadicity, to young people. I wonder to what extent teachers are teaching “ethnographic approaches to reading and writing” these days…
“After attending this relationship of interpretation and representation is a provisional challenge made particularly important just now because of the wrongheadedness of Richard Rorty and the new positivists (who have the effrontery to call themselves new pragmatists) who think that recognition of the role of interpretation entails the rejection of the very idea of representation. It would be impossible to reclaim rhetoric as a hermeneutical enterprise if we couldn’t conceive of symbolization or if we couldn’t account for interpretation in logical terms” (281). ***She offers here as a model Peirce’s curious triangle a la Richards’ The Meaning of Meaning.
“…To find a central place for interpretation in teaching, as a recognized an centrality in learning” (282). ***
“In the triadic perspective, we can legitimately differentiate, once again, variant readings and misreadings; ambiguities can, once again, be recognized as ‘the very hinges of all thought,’ as Richard puts it (How 24)” (282).
**In the section “Misunderstanding and Its Remedies,” Berthoff writes “The idea of remediation was never problematic for Richards; indeed, that interest is consonant with the idea that interpretation is centrally important to pedagogy. Just so, the book which followed The Philosophy of Rhetoric was entitled Interpretation in Teaching” (282). ***I need to read those books. What interests me is the term “remediation” as it’s used here. This section UsesMetaphorsFrom medicineAnywayThat most people would identify as taboo.Remediation in this section refers back to the subtitle and the idea of “Remedy”: to fix, to cure, to heal. The notion speaks with the idea of “misunderstanding.” Both concepts assume an ideal, a “rightness.”
“The alignment of interpretation and remediation is expectable, if we remember that medicine was, along with law and exegesis, one of the original hermeneutic arts. Dia-gnosis is critical knowledge about; dia-gnosis means interpreting symptoms and other remedies can be prescribed” (282).
“In the triadic perspective, the teaching of writing is seen as hermeneutic, medical metaphors express a concern with a process by which health is regained”(283).
“And we should realize that Piaget and others who have shown us that mistakes are ways of learning assume that mistakes will in the course of things be identified and considered, in order for them to be transcended or transformed. Unidentified error has no heuristic value” (283). ***”Mistakes are ways of learning”… Not “a method”… Are “outcomes” useful when we conceive of them as ideal potentiality only? “Students will be able to…” “Students will demonstrate…” How do we assess? What does success look like?
“In Freire’s pedagogy of knowing and in Richards’s practical criticism, we have the resources for reclaiming the concept of diagnosis-interpretation, not as an imputation of sickness but as an art of healing” (283). **What does this mean?
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