Archived Weblog Entry - 08/21/2004: "Theories I Don't Believe In"

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08/21/2004 Archived Entry: "Theories I Don't Believe In"

Theories I Don't Believe In Part I:

Literacy: It's not that I don't believe it ever was a useful way of understanding how individuals use and create information, I just don't believe it exists anymore. Technology has altered literacy to something else (we hear new media, electracy, e-literacies...what's in a name? It ain’t literacy). Harvey Graff did a good job exposing the literacy myth in terms of its economic pay off, but even still, the literacy narrative has become a conventional trope in composition studies. Mike Rose may it popular, but others, even in technology-oriented studies, continue to believe that the individual’s work with a computer is what determines some variant of (digital) literacy. People are not empowered only by learning a tool. What we have understood as literacy is more than the ability to learn how to make information because I can write or read. What we call literacy is built in the infrastructure, the apparatus. The infrastructure has changed so much since the end of the Second World War, that literacy narratives don't explain much anymore (and neither do "sponsors" of literacy").

Hermeneutics: Please, please, please stop explaining to me what a "text" means. Frankly, I don't care. To paraphrase Woody Allen, explaining texts all the time means you don't know how to make them on your own.

Visual Rhetoric: Like literacy, it's an overused trope which really explains very little. Its cache is in its popularity: hey, there's meaning in them images. Really? And you just figured that out (see the latest JAC for yet another example of this kind of thinking)? That there is rhetorical value and usage in images is true, of course. But this phrase "visual rhetoric" has become little more than a synonym for how to read images. “Here’s a bunch of ads. Tell me what the visual rhetoric is.” To take a page from Austin, the folks who triumph visual rhetoric need to spend more time with "how to do things with images," and less time with how to read images.

Capitalism: I'm not against capitalism; I just don't think it exists. Whenever a finger is pointed at the U.S. and "down with capitalism" chanted, I think: but this country isn't all capitalism. There's way too much government involvement at all kinds of levels of economic production, and there is plenty (even if not enough) socialism. Like that public school you went to? How about that tax break? What about all the governmental subsidies floating around? And that road you drive on? Etc.

Vegan(ism): Listen, cheese. "nuff said. Can't be a vegan as long as there is cheese. And beer.

Clarity: The most popular trope of composition studies, it is passed from textbook to textbook as if a world of unclear rhetoric – from Dionysus to Nietzsche to Breton to Burroughs to Wu Tang to Adaweb to Madlib (and so many I leave out in between) - never existed. You would think advertising would put an end to the emphasis on clarity. Remember (or still see) those wonderful Levi’s ads of a few years back which made no sense at all ( DJ gets on a bus with a teddy bear in his arms, a cowboy hat on his head, heads off to some empty bar…what the hell was that about?) yet were very persuasive? When Berlin equated the clarity trope with the desire to produce students who wouldn’t challenge the system, he was on the money. We hear this false theory of discourse in its other flavors too: purpose, coherence, unity, the topic sentence, etc. But it all boils down to the same, to borrow from Elvis Costello, be uncomplicated. Don’t rock the boat. Make sure everything is nice and clear, open and fair, and justice for all. “If you’re not clear, you won’t be understood…” Oh really? Did postmodernism never happen? How about that lovely rant in the Phaedrus about love (that’s a psycho trip if there ever was one)? What about the fantastic Nike commercial for the Whatever…Mark McGuire being chased into a boat’s open port by us, the viewer…WHATEVER the ad states. Huh? Not clear at all. Doesn’t seem Nike was complaining about sales. Yeah, this entry could go on and one and one and one…BASS! How low can you go? Oops. Wasn’t clear about that last remark, was I?

Replies: 4 comments

It's on today's blog, Jeff. It's in two parts: the Text Collection Project and then Paper 5. As you can see, I'm trying to publish my entire course, with some rationale. It might be of interest to your students who are planning courses for the first time.

Posted by John @ 08/24/2004 09:54 PM EST

Thanks, John. Is the street text assignment on your blog? I didn't see it there.

Posted by jeff @ 08/24/2004 10:45 AM EST

I like this post, Jeff. I think I'll refer my students to after we're a few weeks into the term (sometime in October).

What I especially like is the notion that "doing" is part of critiquing. I've tried producing several visual essays the past year, trying to understand how my own photos can be integrated with my writing. And my street text collection assignment starts with getting students to notice the everyday rhetorical environment--then leads them to analysis, and finally writing their own street text. It has worked very well in the first course in FYC.

Posted by John @ 08/24/2004 12:27 AM EST

Maybe one of these days, I'll try and do a couple of entries like these--I like the idea, and agree with just about everything you say.

At this point, the phrase "visual rhetoric" brings me almost nothing but pain. And you're dead on--most of what happens under its auspices isn't all that different from the old Signs of Life textbook. It's a mix of cult stud and semiotics that falls right in line with our field's almost constant misappropriation of Barthes's Mythologies. Ugh.

collin

ps. good call on Saper. His book is another one of those "great books that no one in C/R has ever read."

Posted by cgb @ 08/22/2004 09:51 AM EST