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12/22/2004 Archived Entry: "Comp Stubbornness"

Composition Stubbornness
Composition studies is stubborn.
Its stubbornness resembles, at times, the movie industry and music industry clamping down on p2p. Rather than try to understand how p2p is changing the nature of reception, entertainment, distribution, and production, the industry tries to shut down the entire p2p operations as illegal and exemplary of copyright infringement. That copyright, as so many have now written online and elsewhere, may be the product itself of a different logic and different time period (early print culture and the invention of book manufacturing and selling) and now be in need of an update doesn't matter to p2p foes. It's wrong. Stop it now.
We see that stubbornness repeated in composition studies. Those that view specific legacies and models of instruction as still relevant as is in the digital age are as stubborn as the industrial giants that fight p2p applications. "But it is our responsibility to teach clarity and well crafted prose," many cry out. “Nothing is more important than teaching the essay.” “Where’s your thesis!” A good deal of that composition desire is legitimate, as is the desire to continue to make a living selling entertainment. But how the vague concepts of clarity and well-crafted writing are understood in light of technological change still does not spark much interest. That there exist logics which structure our understanding of culture, rhetoric, and writing, and that those logics shift eventually under technological change is a lost point. No one gives a damn. “Our students just can’t write,” is the only response these folks can think of.
Those in this game for some time respond in cynical fashion (circulating their so-called "experience" as tropes for credibility): "Ah, we used to think ‘radical’ stuff mattered. We've learned our lesson since. You are so naïve."
Others respond in instrumental fashion: "Our purpose is not to teach how to make web pages. We're writing teachers."
And still even among the newly convinced, we find instrumental reasoning governing the teaching of technology and writing, this reasoning is rooted in a disciplinary stubbornness to move beyond print paradigms: “In this assignment you will analyze several websites/weblogs and point out their audience, purpose, etc” or: “Design a website for X business using usability testing and web standards. Identify the audience and purpose for your project.”
And yet, this stubbornness doesn't seem to get the complainers anywhere but deeper mired in a culture of disappointment and dissatisfaction. For others, the stubbornness fabricates a feeling of being digital, even if the methods and ideologies dictating this “new” work are almost the same as that which came before blogs, websites, or Flash.
WPA-L has become a solid example of this occurring. CCCC another locale.
These days, I feel like I make my living yelling at and critiquing that stubbornness. There is something very dissatisfying in that as well.
I have seen certain folks throw up their hands and walk away, staying within the field but refusing to contribute any longer to a stubborn discursive structure hostile to ideas different than its own. I have seen others who are within composition simply ignore composition.
This is too long an entry, I know. And I could say more regarding this stubbornness, that it really isn’t a new phenomenon at all, that its roots extend back to the invention of the field and become pronounced in the early and mid 1960s. But enough for now. I got a Detroit snow storm to await and a new book about the other side of Robert Johnson to read (and comment on later).

Posted by joanna @ 12/23/2004 03:51 PM EST