It begins (I guess)

So yesterday I started the “going on the market” stuff.  There’s a certain job that’s been posted for awhile that I’ve always known I’d apply for.  Rachel’s asked me several times if I’d begun gathering/generating the necessary writings etc. to actually apply.  I’ve always told her that I’d do it this summer.  And now the time is right to start.

So I’ve been drafting an application letter, revising my CV, and I’ve consulted my first familiar consigliere. It’s going to be a lot of work.  This writing is hard.  Perhaps it’s not hard for everyone, but it’s hard for me.  

You know, it feels like that I crossed a major threshhold when I started working seriously on my dissertation, which was that bullshit no longer cut it.  In a project as thorough as a dissertation, the short-cuts that I have always taken with seminar papers and response journals and other academic thing like that just don’t fly.  I now have to do real intellectual work.  Not to downplay the real learning I did during my coursework and exams, but it’s just not the same.  The diss is more real, for lack of a better description.

Now, as I write job letters, I’m really having to do a lot of soul-searching to figure out how I’m going to represent who I am as a scholar, a teacher, and how I can honestly “sell” myself.  I’ve got some good models, but they only go so far.

It’s a lot of hard writing for me.  But I’m glad it’s started.  I ready to move on to the next thing, and it feels good to make strides in that direction. 

I have a strange sense of calm today.  Strange given quickly elapsing summer days and the work and commitments piling up, not to mention the quickly approaching next steps I’ll be taking in the coming months (going on the market).  My calm could have something to do with the fact that I’ve avoided all forms of caffeine today.  In any event, I like it.  I’m going to try to go uncaffienated for a while.  We’ll see what comes of it.  

I really do teach writing

Yeah, I’ve taught writing for seven years.  Every semester.  But trying to write a dissertation makes me feel like a total fraud.

I’m sure my feelings are totally natural and “to be expected.”  I just can’t wait to be on the other side of this.  Even to be in the middle of it with more of a clue would be okay with me.

But seriously, after this is all over, I wonder what I’ll say the key to writing productively is.

Hope someday I’ll look back at this post and say, “Yep, I remember being there.  Glad that’s over!”

Blogging again, maybe.

Actually, who knows.  It’s been over seven months since I’ve blogged on this blog.  I was in a different place with my project when I wrote the post below.

I don’t think I want to write exclusively or a lot about my project here.  I’m the kind of writer that needs to do a lot of shitty writing and, honestly, shitty thinking, a long and laborious process that I don’t necessarily want to make public.

But, this morning, and for the past few days, I’ve felt the blogging bug a little bit.  Probably because I’ve been reading blogs for hours a day, working on my chapter.  I’m going through a year of posts on three different autism blogs, coding discourse in a way that I hope will show how blogs afford several kinds of rhetorical agency.

Anyway, I’ve had the urge to blog several times recently about different things, so why not officially open the door again.  More to come soon, I hope.

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Now, sitting in Starbuck’s, I’m having moment of nostalgia (and envy) as I see the person across the room reading Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer.  The Moviegoer was the first of many Walker Percy novels I read.  Walker Percy’s novels and essays have influenced me probably more than any other writer, but it’s been awhile since I thought about him.  Seeing the cover of his first novel, just now, was a breath of fresh air.

Last week’s news week has a really good article by Michael Craig Miller M.D. that discusses the meaning and politics of psychiatric diagnosis.  Miller says things that I tried to say in my prospectus, but more articulately.  He discusses the revisions of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders and how different cultural logics affected the way that resource was written and used.  I particularly like the speculations in his conclusion:

What’s next? Here’s a prediction: DSM-V authors will approach their work with a generous attitude toward human nature, and will create a diagnostic system consistent with today’s scientific knowledge. They will offer it, not as the last word, but as a tool for testing hypotheses about mental suffering. After all, good science is about getting it both right and wrong. And wisdom—with all due respect to the Greeks—is about appreciating how much we do not know.

There are so many great things in that prediction and so many embedded discourses, and I like where it leaves the reader.  Throughout the article, Miller discusses various notions of diagnosis: as “recognition,” as “labeling,” and an affront to individuality. His conclusion suggests a “both/and” attitude toward diagnosis that I kind of like: the need for a ”generous attitude toward human nature” while also listening to science, realizing its use and its limitations.

 More on this later.

Thinking about my diss., subject-position, Rhetorical Listening Gloss

At one point in my prospectus, I say something like, “autism cause a convergence between my personal and professional life.”  I say something like “I was asking questions about autism discourse that I learned to ask by studying rhetorical theory.”  Really, I wasn’t trying to over-think it, it just happened.  Anyway, I’m now trying to smartly articulate exactly what those questions were . . .  a project for another day.

 

Anyway . ..

 

            There is no doubt that this project on autism occurred to me because subject-position as both a parent and rhetorician.  I suppose everyone’s projects and undertakings become salient places for inquiry because of places they’ve been and experiences they’ve had.  So, I’m not all that different.  But I still think that this convergence of the most important consideration in my personal life (JD) with the most important thing in my professional life (the diss.) is worth wringing out a bit.  Reason being, I think my personal narrative  (all the listening I’ve had to do) is the conduit or the reason why Rhetorical Listening feels so right. 

            But, I also want to this realization of the powerful influence of subject position is important, too.  In “When the First Voice You Hear is Not Your Own,” Jacqueline Jones Royster argues for that subject position is important and is something we should recognize and foreground in our scholarship.  Here’s Royster, who articulates it so well, and so perfectly for my project, I think:

Using subject position as a terministic screen in cross-boundary discourse permits analysis to operate kaleidoscopically, thereby permitting interpretation to be richly informed by the converging dialectical perspectives.  Subjectivity as a defining value pays attention dynamically to context, ways of knowing, language abilities, and experience, and by doing so it has a consequent potential to deepen, broaden, and enrich out interpretive views in dynamic ways as well. . . . In a fundamental way, this enterprise supports the sense of rhetoric, composition, and literacy studies as a field of study that embraces the imperative to understand truths and consequences of language more fully. (29-30)  

What a great word: Kaliedoscopically!  Yes, it’s clear that rhetoric, literacy, writing studies—all those methods by which I’ve learned to ask questions can—should—go there: into autism.  If you pay attention, you start to notice that (mainstream media) public discourse about is pretty tenuous, the same old oversimplified thing all the time.  But, dig a little deeper, you find that it’s dynamic, polemical, dense, vibrant, intractable.  It needs to be listened to deeply, objectively, subjectively, passionately.  After reading Kurk’s post, I feel like I want to say that it needs to be contemplated and enjoyed, too.

 

Okay, below, I’m trying to articulate what/why rhetorical listening (in 3 pages or less—orders from the director because she knows I’m long winded and I’ll go on for 10-15 pages if left to my own devices.)  Probably not my final draft.  Just the work I did today.  Thought I’d post it.

 

______________________________

 

            The need for more listening has been a primary focus of a few rhetorical theories that look to bridge differences, overcome silences, or reestablish rhetoric as a positive social tool.  One notable example is Rhetoric: Discovery and Change, the landmark text in which Richard Young, Alton Becker, and Kenneth Pike appropriate the techniques of psychotherapist Carl Rogers to develop a rhetorical approach that facilitates understanding through the elimination of threat. Young, Becker, and Pike’s approach necessitates that interlocutors each attempt to first demonstrate that the other’s position is understood and represented fairly thus enabling communication and, perhaps, persuasion.

            In a kindred way, Cheryl Glenn examines silences that occurs as a result of threat and uneven power dynamics. Glenn looks at times in history when silence has been used as a necessary, and intentional, rhetorical technique, and she also looks at times when silence has been a forced result of power or cultural dynamics (i.e. when people have been silenced).  Approaches to rhetoric like Glenn’s invites us to “listen” for voices that are not present in our rhetorical theories and traditions.

            In another attempt to infuse listening into rhetoric, Wayne Booth advocates for “Listening Rhetoric” in his final book The Rhetoric of Rhetoric.  According to Booth, Listening Rhetoric aims to “pursue to truth behind our differences.”  Booth divides listening rhetoric into five degrees, including hope for dialogue (LR-a), dialogue despite the beliefs of the interlocutor (LR-b), listening as a strategy for “Winning Rhetoric” (LR-c), self-censorship (LR-d), and dogmatic listening (LR-e).  Each variations foregrounds listening as a foundation for rhetorical productivity.

            While Young, Becker and Pike, Glenn, and Booth all take important strides in establishing the necessity of listening, Krista Ratcliffe theorizes listening most thoroughly in Rhetorical Listening: Identification, Gender, Whiteness. She argues that listening is an all but neglected leg of rhetoric and has not been overtly theorized by rhetoricians in the same ways that speaking and writing and even reading have been. She notes that it’s often assumed that everyone knows how to listen already and so it doesn’t merit studying.  But Ratcliffe argues that this inattention to listening has created a society that privileges utterance at the expense of understanding.  As a result, many of the differences among people or groups in society seem so irreconcilable that attempts for dialogue or negotiation are nonexistent.  Even when people are willing to understand and negotiate differences, it is difficult.  The breakdown of listening between interlocutors perpetuate person, cultural, and political divides that are nearly impossible to overcome through argument alone. Thus, the difficulty of listening is exacerbated a culture that undervalues it and, hence, under-theorizes it.  For these reasons, Ratcliffe demonstrates that listening is a rhetorical skill that people must consciously engage in and work to sharpen.

            Ratcliffe describes Rhetorical Listening as a “trope for interpretive invention:” interpretive because by listening we can we can learn about different standpoints; inventive because we often need to take a heuristical approach to fully understand other points of view and cultural logics.  Rhetorical Listening implies a “stance of openness” that leads to a more productive “code of cross-cultural conduct” (1). But, as Ratcliffe explains, Rhetorical Listening is far more complicated that simply learning about other individuals or cultures or simply being willing to listen.  As she shows, when we examine other points of view, we discover messy, complicated identifications that are entrenched in language and history, knots that are not easily untangled.  In Rhetorical Listening, however, she shows how rhetorical listening can be employed to 1) better understand self and other; 2) make one more accountable for one’s point of view and claims; 3) better understand commonalities and differences; 4) recognize that claims must be understood in the context of their cultural logics.

            Of course, rhetoricians are familiar with the importance identification has for persuasion, identity and community, with Kenneth Burke’s notion of consubstantiality being the most well-known and influential point of reference.  But Ratcliffe points out that notions of Burke’s theory of identification foregrounds commonality at the expense of differences.  Burke teaches us much about why people come together by feeling a common bond that is often subconscious.  Ratcliffe notes that we often represent this kind of identification visually with overlapping circles, the overlap representing the identification.  Using this model, differences are literally marginalized; they are, ostensibly, unimportant because commonality has established identification.

            But Ratcliffe points out that only recognizing points of identification is insufficient because identifications are often are often troubled or wrought by uneven power dynamics, history, or ignorance.  Perhaps even more trouble are what Ratcliffe calls disidentifications: that is, times when people or groups consciously choose not to identify with another person or group based on a flawed subconscious notion (Xenophobia is Ratcliffe’s example of this).  In other words, there are times when subconscious identification is affected by ignorance, where “identification has been made and denied in the unconscious.”  In short, Ratcliffe points out that identification is fallible and must be rigorously interrogated in the places it is found.

            Even more important to Ratcliffe, however, are the places where identification does not exist, where cultural discourses diverge and non-identification occurs.  Ratcliffe argues that we must be accountable to examine our differences, not just our sameness, because only by appreciating our differences can we negotiate different standpoints.  Discourses, she says, are like rays of light: invisible to the eye but simultaneously permeating many bodies.  We must be mindful not only of what deeply ingrained dominant discourses tell us about people and cultures, but also how these discourses have affected and been internalized by individuals today and throughout history, how discourses subtly socialize us into ways of thinking, for ill or good. 

            Interrogating the identifications, disidentifications, and non-identifications of contemporary autism discourse will explain both the size and diversity of autism advocacy.  Advocacy efforts are an especially fertile place to find overt identifications, since they represent efforts to concertedly act on behalf of another party.  In order to make the arguments that advocacy requires, a collective view of the cause/exigencies/need must be put forth.  In the case of autism, advocates must account for autism as a devastation, a difference, or somewhere in between.  Additionally, offer standpoints that suggest and ethos, sound evidence, or authority to speak.  The utter incompatibilities between many strands of autism advocacy—the disagreements that exist between conscientious people who have a desire to improve the lives of people with autism—suggest that rhetorical listening is both a warranted and responsible approach for someone like myself who want to understand these discourses for personal as well as academic reasons.       

Rhetorical Listening (extremely long, non-linear post)

I’m going to pick up where I left off at the end of last post by explaining my understanding of Rhetorical Listening and why I think it’s perfect for my project on the discourses of autism. First, I want to talk about why the idea of listening appeals to me (as a method, as an anchor, as an exigence for my project). Then, I want to try to work through some complex ideas in Ratcliffe’s Rhetorical Listening theory. Then, at the end, I’ll try to summarize everything.

I want to go back a few months to when I originally pitched this project to a few people–to my writing group, to the director, and to my second reader. It’s difficult to describe the profundity that led up to that pitch. I’ve said in several places that my worlds to collided, my personal life met my professional life. All the training I had in rhetoric, literacy, writing studies, new media (virtually every scholarly area I consider myself versed in) seemed to give me a certain take on events that were happening in my personal life: namely, the diagnosis of my son with Autism Spectrum Disorder and Rachel’s and my concerted effort to learn everything we could about autism and everything that goes along with it.

Within two weeks of JD’s diagnosis, I attended CCCC’s, and how’s this for serendipity: we checked in, went up to our hotel room, and I opened up my conference program to a panel about autism that started in fifteen minutes. I went downstairs to the panel and heard a take on autism that I’d never heard before. I was introduced to the idea of neurodiversity and the neurodiversity movement which argues that autism is a difference and not a disorder or disease or devastation or fill in the blank. I was amazed. In all the reading and research I’d done (for practical, not scholarly reasons), I had never come across arguments like this; I’d never know about this kind of advocacy. Sure, I’d paid attention to the causation debates, the questions of whether vaccines have anything to do with triggering autism. I knew about the different approaches to therapy and about some of the writhing debates surrounding them. I even knew that the notion of an “autism epidemic” might be a bit suspect, since methodologies and awareness had changed over the past couple decades. But, the panelists at CCCC complicated my thinking/understanding even more.

The next morning, I went to another panel on autism! In it, Ann Jurecic talked about students who are “on the spectrum” in writing classrooms. (In June, her article, “Neurodiversity,” which covers and theorizes her experience came out in College English.) Another panelist discussed visual representations of autistic people, both in magazines (like Time) and in movies (like The Squid and the Whale). In both panels, I was able to ask questions and join in the discussions that followed. Before CCCC, I had noticed the diversity of the rhetorical landscape. At CCCC, I learned more about it. But more importantly, I saw rhetoricians doing actual projects about the discourses of autism. I felt a very profound identification because some of my tacit and contemplated feelings about about the very discourses I was swimming in in my personal life were being articulated and theorized by rhetoricians. I could not quit thinking about it.

It was a couple days later, as Rachel and I were eating dinner at a restaurant off of Time Square, that I told her that I was changing my dissertation project to “autism.” I didn’t quite know how I would unpack autism as a rhetoric project, but I knew I wanted to be somewhere in that ballpark. When I got home from CCCC, I got to work. I didn’t want to screw it up by casually pitching this project idea to the director or anyone else. I wanted to be careful–to make a well thought out argument for why such a topic could be dissertation worthy. I spent a few days typing up a document that layed it out: all the debates and diversity amid the conversations about autism, all that I had learned and completely bought into about neurodiversity and social justice and acceptance of differences. I identified good guys and bad guys, us-es and thems. In my eagerness, I drew some pretty strong conclusions.

Then, I emailed it around. To my delight, the project idea was received well (I think I told five people about it). Importantly, both the director and the 2nd reader thought it had definite potential. At the same time, they both said “Whoa, Nelly!” (in their written comments). I remember the director (who’s very directive) told me not to draw conclusions, that I was getting way ahead of myself. She said I needed to ask research questions, set up a study, determine how I was going to collect that data, and what methodology I was going to use to make meaning out of my data. What a buzzkill, right?

Actually, she couldn’t have been more right. Instead of jumping to a claim–the what’s what–I needed to be asking why questions and how questions. Like, “Why are there so many different perspectives, so many different meanings of autism?” In fact, I remember that in the original document that I circulated, I had made the statement that, from my point of view, autism has so many meanings (i.e. vast array of manifestations) that it really has no meaning at all. The director circled that statement and in the margin wrote something to the effect of, “Sure it does [have meaning], you just have to find out how it means.”

She was absolutely right. Autism always has meaning, everytime it’s used. Many times it means in completely different ways. And that’s what I’m interested in. Not so much the single word, but the discourses that surround, envelop and invoke that word; the discourses that are often invisible. Between my own research, my experience at CCCC, my trips to various doctors, my roamings around the blogosphere, my experience at the ASA national conferences, I’ve heard many difference meanings of autism, often subtle, often not. Rarely are these different definitions involved in dialogue.

In my project, I’m not trying to push the one and only definition or view of autism. I want to understand how reasonable, or loving/caring, even charitable, often professional people can disagree or have different understandings about autism. That’s where Rhetorical Listening comes in. As I mentioned in the last post, I read Krista Ratcliffe’s book a couple years ago, and then again for my comps, and I thought it was one of the two best books I read in grad school. I had thought about it’s applicability to this project several times, but as I was mired in the writing/articulation-of-the-project process, I never quite had the clarity to see just how necessary it is. But, after the director and I discussed that my project was really emerging as a “rhetoric project,” it clicked. My projects was about listening, about trying to make sense of, about how world-views are often created by and embedded in language. Listening to these discourses, I think, has a lot to offer those who want to better understand rhetoric and also those who need to understand what’s going on with all the people talking about autism.

To summarize it kind of quickly before I delve into it, Ratcliffe defines Rhetorical Listening is several key ways. She first explains that listening is a neglected fourth leg of rhetoric (the other three being reading, writing, and speaking.) Listening is often assumed to be something everybody does already and not meritting study. So, a foundational premise of Rhetorical Listening is that the task of the rhetorician is to theorize not just writing/speaking but also listening. We should listen critically to our own discourse, the discourse of our academic research and the discourses of others.

Ratcliffe explains that listening can be beneficial trope to rhetoricians in many ways. Here’s several that are mentioned:

• Rhetorical Listening can generate dialogue and understanding across cultures and across differences.
• Rhetorical Listening can be a trope for interpretive invention: interpretive because we can learn about different standpoints; invention because we need heuristics to get to these other standpoints.
• Rhetorical Listening challenges us to become apprentices of discourse rather than masters of a discourse.
• Rhetorical Listening helps us to develop a broader cultural literacy “which affords opportunities for negotiating daily attitudes and actions, our politics and ethics.”
• Rhetorical Listening is necessary because we are all–rhetoricians especially–accountable for recognizing that “none of us lives autonomous lives . . . [and] all people have a stake in each other’s quality of life. . . [and that] our standpoints are not autonomous points of static stases but rather complex webs of dynamically intermingled cultural structures and subjective agency.”
• Rhetorical Listening allows us to “focus on the present, with attention to the resonances of the past.”
• Rhetorical Listening allows us to see ties between the personal (a person’s claim) and the political (a cultural logic).

Whew! (There’s a lot more, but that should give you the gist.)

Ratcliffe argues that rhetorical listening is about listening “with intent to hear troubled identifications, instead of listening for intent of an author” (46). To me, that means that discourse–an given utterance, even–is always messier than “author’s intent”–the simplistic “what is being said.” No, discourse is “troubled” by much more than that; there’s much more for us to hear than merely what is being said. In discourse, we can hear histories, power dynamics, cultural logics, ignorance, stereotypes, desperation. When we intend to do h(ear)ing, not just reading and receiving, we use our rhetorical and intellectual sensitivity to understand more fully. Rhetorical Listening is different from Rhetorical Speaking or Rhetorical Writing (that which so often gets the full attention of us rhetoricians). Rhetorical Listening is about putting understanding–not necessarily as the end in itself, but something to be achieved before persuasion.

Let me explain that a little more: Ratcliffe makes clear that Rhetorical Listening is not just about an “I’m OK, you’re OK” empathy disposition. It’s not a “can’t everybody just get along” type of statement. Rather it’s an ethical imperative, and “accountability logic” as Ratcliffe explains it, that can take us beyond guilt/blame, good guys/bad guys–beyond what she (following Heidegger) calls the divided logos–a discurive point of view that we have inherited in the West. She explains that Heidegger claimed that logos implied both speaking and listening, and, to that end, he explored

“the relationship between the Greek noun logos and its verb form legein, which in its fullest sense means both ’saying’ and ‘laying’ The second meaning, “laying,” entails laying others’ ideas in front of us in order to let these ideas lie before us. This laying-to-let-lie-before-us functions as a perservation of others’ ideas and, hence, as a site for listening’ (23-24)

In a divided logos, however,–which is a culture we have inherited, according to Heidegger and Ratcliffe–”’saying’ has assumed dominance and ‘laying’ (and, thus, listening) has been displaced” (24). What, I ask, are the consequences of displaced listening? I think there are many consequences to displaced listening. (Isn’t listening what we try do get students to do in writing classroom when we do ethnography projects, rhetorical case studies, exploratory essays?)

Though Ratcliff unpacks displaced listening and Rhetorical Listening by focusing on race, gender, and whitness, I think displaced listening can be seen really well by looking at autism. But, as soon as I say that, I recognize that it’s not that simple (and I’m not implying that Ratcliffe represents RL as that simple, either. To the contrary, she admits that it’s often messy). Why is listening displaced among autism stakeholders? I think it has a great deal to do with power dynamics, history, media, ethos issues, cultural logics, and many, many other complex things.

At the heart of Rhetorical Listening is the idea of identification, Burkes and others’, too. Of course, most rhetoricians are familiar with many of Kenneth Burke’s contributions to rhetoric, but especially his notion of identification. Burke theorized the psychological leg of rhetoric (i.e. what happens in people’s minds when persuasion happens) exhaustively. He threw a lot of stuff at the wall, but what sticks with most non-Burkean rhetoricians is this idea of identification or consubstantiality, a phenomenon in which one is persuaded or feels a solidarity with the rhetorical message on a subconscious level. Because rhetoric operates also at a subconscious level and is not limited to the an individual rhetor, Burke is able to broaden rhetoric as an inherently social phenomena. (I know that this is a drastic oversimplification here. Deal with it.)

The point is, because KB was the most important and influential and smartest (I argue) twentieth century rhetorician, his idea of identification (which is one of his most accessible ideas) gets a lot of circulation. However, Ratcliffe argues that Burkean identification is limited because it sacrifices all for commonality. That is, it foregrounds sameness and backgrounds differences. Put another way, any differences that might exist between speaker/audience, group/member, society/citizenship are sacrificed/cast-off/grayed-out for the sake of identification.

Of course, it is faulty to assume that any time identification happens it’s a clean, just, neutral, egalitarian phenomenon. The visual metaphor for identification is the Venn diagram, the overlapping circles, with the overlap representing the area of identification between individuals and/or communities. But the partial overlap of the circles begs the realization that the overlap is, in fact, partial. In what ways does that which is not inside the overlap affect the overlap? Probably more than we like to think.

However, rhetoricians, just like many other people, know that things like power differentials, prejudices, cultures affect world-views, memberships, and identifications. Because of this, Ratcliffe argues that we need to interrogate troubled identifications: not just identifications that are troubled by history or power or cultural differences, but also disidentifications in which “identification has been made and denied in the unconscious”–that is, when someone overtly does not identify with someone or something based on inaccurrate stereotypes or misunderstandings. Ratcliffe uses the example of Xenophobia “when, say, an American disavows an identification with a Syrian, which the American is only able to do because she has first identified with the Syrian, or, more precisely, with what she imagines a Syrian to be” (62). (Now, I haven’t exactly done the formal research yet, but I suspect (know) disidentifications abound amongst autism advocates!)

The big point is this: Identification is fallible, and we need to recognize that. Identifications often occurs at the expense of someone or some community, and disidentification often occurs based upon deeply flawed identifications. We should look closely at that particularly. As Ratcliffe puts it,

“If such disidentifications can be brought to consciousness (and obviously not all of them can), then places for negotiating coexisting commonalities and differences may emerge. Such a project is far from simple. For identifications and disidentifications are always evolving, always slippery.”

But where/how exactly does Rhetorical Listening fit in with identification? Besides listening for “trouble” among identifications and disidentifications, Ratcliffe encourages us to look at places of non-identification, as well–places where no agreement does not exist. In other words, let’s listen for differences not just commonality. Rather than (arrogantly?) graying out differences for the same of sameness, let’s make some space where we can appreciate, and study, and negotiate differences, too.

One way we might begin to listen better (to both difference and commonality) is to refresh our visual representations of identification–the psychological impact of discourse. Instead, of overlapping ciricles, ingestion, and the like, Ratcliffe suggests thinking of identification as occurring in an energy field. Because I like her explanation, I’m quoting at length:

Like rays of sunlight, discourses are invisible to the human eye and yet may simultaneously permeat multiple bodies as when millions of people view a movie, read the same book, or listen to a presidents speech. Depending on a person’s psychical and historical/cultural locations, he or she may internalize the discourses differently. In this way, a person is contually socialized into general cutlrual discourses while particularlized as a subject. . . .

Energy-field imagery clearly represents how such discursive identifications and disidentifications provide people lenses for seeing the world. Consider how the competing discourses of “the good mother” may permeate all our bodies and socialize us. Such discourses abound in the U.S. whether in books, movies, or families’ oral traditions. Though all these discourses are external to people’s bodies, they also permeate bodies and become embodied. Whether I identify or disidentify with these discourses, they affect my attitudes and daily interactions with my daughter, my husband, my friends, and even students in my classes. And because my daughter, husband, friends, and students are exposed to similar if not identical discourses, my encounters with these people are also informed by their encounters with “the good mother” discourses. These discourses are multiple with definitions differing depending upon the people and/or instutitions promoting each discourse. Moreover, these discourses compete with other socializing discourses, such as those of individualism and self-affirmation.

. . . Once discursive energy fields bcome embodied in people, the discourses are channeled and changed–sometimes greatly, sometimes minutely–by the bodies they occupy. In other words, people may reinforce, revise, and/or resist the discursive energy fields in which they find themselves.

Energy-field imagery makes visible the functions of metaphoric identifications and disidentifications that are sometimes mystified by images of interlocking circles or ingestion. First, energy-field imagery makes visible the doubled function of discourse: That is, discourse both socializes us and enables us to talk back to our socialization. Within the play of this energy-field imagery, discourses permeate us, and we permeat them, each being changed by the other. (my emphasis).

Ratcliffe also explains that we might get further down the road by going beyond what might be simplistic “metaphoric concepts of identification.” Identification can be conceived of by metaphorically, overlapping circles, gravity, ingestion, infection, or shared energy fields. As Ratcliffe uses Fuss to explain:

To the extent that identification is a desire to be like or as the other, to the extent, in other words, that identification is fundamentally a question of resemblance and replacement, metaphor provides the most direct point of entry into the internal workings of a complex cultural and psychical process. (67)

But, the thing about metaphor–any metaphor–is that it’s based on commonalities. Using our metaphors, we can identify and study these commonalities/identifications. But how might we study non-identification? i.e. when the the circles don’t overlap even though different parties are involved in discourses. I’d say that the energy-field metaphor gets a little further down that road, but we need to press further–find more techniques–if we’re going to listen to differences.

What if, instead of the metaphor trope, we used metonymy? As Ratcliffe explains, “The differences between these two figures are important. Metaphor foregrounds resemblances based on commonalities, thus backgrounding differences; metonym foregrounds resemblances based on juxtaposed associations, thus foregrounding both commonalities and differences.

Metonymy signals a juxtaposition rather than overlap or shared space. Using the metonymy trope, we can acknowledge can be associated/juxtaposed/bound by common discourses, even if they don’t identify with each other. We can recognize a margin between. A margin between, Ratliffe says, can “

provide a place of pause, a place of reflection, a place that invites people to admit that gaps exist. Admissions of gaps may take the form of I don’t know you,” “I don’t know what I don’t know about you,” or even “I don’t know that I don’t know that you exist”–whetehr you you is a person, place, thing, or idea. In some cases, rhetorical listening in the place of non-identification may precede new identifications; in other cases, it enables us to revisit former identifications and disidentifications . . . .

What’s important is the process of non-identification, however, is that people recognize the partiality of our visions and listen for that-which can-not-be-seen, even if it cannot yet be heard. Althought the tactic of listening rhetorically in metonymic places of non-identification cannot guarantee successful results in every situation, the concept of non-identification is imporatnt to rhetoric and composition studies becuase it maps a place, a possibility, for consciously asserting our agency to engage cross-cultural rhetorical exchanges across both commonalities and differences (72-73).

Metonymy allows us to see “subjects who are juxtaposed but not necessarily on common ground, as subjects who are encountering the same socializing discourses but processing them very differently”–or even slightly differently. Either way, difference is not negated.

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Okay, so this post has gotten a bit out of hand. But, really, I’ve just needed to type through some of this stuff. In my next post, I’m going to discuss autism specifically and how rhetorical listening might be applied to its discourses.

Progress on the dissertation front (a very long post)

On Wednesday, I finally got the email from the director telling me that my draft with feedback was in my mailbox up at school.  It was a pretty short email, suggesting that we need to “talk” about “conceptual issues.”  I did know that my draft had “issues,” (I had my own beefs with it), but, as anyone would be, I was pretty curious to see the specifics from the director.  Afterall, even though we’ve talked about this project several times, this was the first time we’ve exchanged writing about it.  Quite a bit different. 

Anyway, on that day, Rachel was out of town, and I had JD at home.  I was trying to get him to take a nap, and he was resisting taking a nap.  I rarely go up to school with him, and I’ve never brought him up there at a time that a lot of people would be around, just because there are so many potential “situations” that can arise with him and his various agendas.  He loves TCU; you could even say he’s obsessed with it–the logo, the campus, frogbites, you name it.  So, my first thought was that since I’d already waited two and half weeks, I could wait until the morning when JD was in school to go get it. 

Yeah.  That idea lasted for all of three minutes.  I decided it was going to drive me crazy not to have the feedback ASAP, so we got in the car and headed up to campus.  There was no close place to park, so once we got there we had to walk across campus, which is pretty far for a 4 year old, but JD did great.  We made it up the elevator, I snagged the draft and couldn’t resist flipping through it immediately.  When we got to the end of the hall, JD wanted to take the stairs.  Immediately as we walked through the doors that separated the hallway from the stairwell, JD burst into an enthusiastic rendition of the ABC song.  . . . There was no stopping it.  He was going to finish, regardless of my protests, so I gave up.  Around the second floor, another person entered the stairwell and joined in as she passed us on the stairs.  I hurried JD ought of the building, and started to make my way back to the car, or so I thought.  JD insisted on going to frogbites, and that wasn’t a battle I wanted to fight, so we did. He meticulously looked at everything in the store, weighing and considering his options, before deciding on a bottle of Ozarka water.  Then, he insisted on sitting in the cafeteria to drink it.  So we did, and I was able to get through most of the comments on my draft.

Overall, the comments are good.  They get me down the road a lot.  I’m excited about the next draft, and I have my work cut out for me.  Here’s the main revisions I need to make:
1) I need to streamline the document a little more by drastically condensing my opening narrative.  Because this project grew out of my personal encounter with autism, I open that way, trying to give my reader a sense of the vertigo that caused my personal and professional/academic life to converge.  It’s a necessary move for me to make as I work out my ideas.  But, I think “for me” is the main part of that last sentence.  Working through that narrative helped me move forward.  It’s a little long for a document that’s supposed to explain my project to my committee.  As of now, I really don’t get to my “here’s what this project will do” statement until page 8.  The director wants that move to happen by page 3.  I agree.  I was uneasy with it before.  I’d like to condense it down to two or three solid paragraphs.

2) I need to cut out the repetition.  I am the epitome of a multi-drafter.  I need to write a lot of pages to produce a few good ones.  When I read Peter Elbow’s Writing Without Teachers during my masters program, it was one of those “a-ha moments” because Elbow described in black and white the way I think and write.  I don’t exactly transpose Elbowian pedagogy to my writing classrooms, but I’ve always known that, for me, it’s what makes the most sense.  All that to say, I think on the page.  It’s how I write.  For me, revising means cutting out the metanarratives, the thinking aloud on paper. 

I’ve done plenty of outloud thinking in my draft.  The director noted five or six times where I explictly say something like “There are many diverse/polemical/different stakeholders in the discourses of autism.”  That is, absolutely, one of the most important points for me.  As I was conceiving this project by looking at the things I was experiencing in my personal life, that’s what I kept noticing.  Most of what was really going on was, and still is, quite ineffable to me, but that was one thing I could say for sure.  That comes out a lot in my draft.  I’m too repetitive.  I need to make the point once and make it strongly.

3) The director and I had a meeting on Friday, and, together, we decided that I’m changing my approach in a number of great ways that I’m really excited about.  These changes, I want to emphasize, are decisions we made together, and now we both feel really, really good about the direction of the project.  Here’s the changes I’m making:

A. I’m cutting the previous plan for chapter five, which was to do a classroom study.  This was the Composition Studies leg of the project, as I had it conceived (i.e. entry points from various sub-disciplines of Rhetoric and Composition).  The idea of that section was cool, but the more I thought about it, the more uncomfortable I was with it.  I think it would complicate my timeline and be really really stressful.  But more than that, I just didn’t seem like it fit as well with what I want to accomplish in this project.  By cutting this section, I can also eliminate parts of the lit review and just focus more.  This is a good thing that the director and I both feel really good about.

B. I’m reconceiving thie project as a rhetoric project.  This suggestion came from the director and feels really really good to me for a couple reasons.  The reason she made this suggestion is because that is the tenor of my project, despite claims I try to make about what I’m going to do in different chapters. If you’ve read the blurb below, my original plan was to approach the discourses of autism from not only a rhetorical criticism point of view, but also from a literacy studies angle (very appropriate, I think, and it was an exam area of mine), from writing studies (as articulated by Susan Miller), from New Media Theory, and from Composition Theory.   I still think that’s a pretty good ideas, but perhaps a little unwieldy for a dissertation.  I was hard to convey (and to wrap my own mind around) what exactly I was going to do with the data.

But more importantly, the project felt to the director, and feels to me, like a rhetoric project.  I’m studying discourses and how they impact different people in different places at different times.  I’m studying a different group of people and type of writing in each chapter and they are groups of people and rhetorical situations that lend themselves pretty well to the different sub-disciplines of rhet/comp, but what if there was a way that I didn’t have to just around like that and change theoretical frameworks?  Would it serve the project better?  Would it, ultimately, help me understand the discourses of autism better?  Would it help the reader more? . . . . I’m thinking it would.

But how do I make that move?  How do I find one anchor point for a project of this size?  A few weeks ago, over lunch, Kurk and I discussed George Steiner’s theory of difficulty.  He had recently discussed it in a blogpost, and I thought it was brilliant in the way it broke down the disconnects that people sometimes have when they approach new discourses.  They can have contigent, modal, tactical, or ontological difficulties.  I thought that parallelled the divergences and convergences within autism discourses beautifully, so I spent the next weekend reading Steiner’s essay, writing about it, and charting things out.  I did some good solid work I think, and it will be useful to me.  The director agrees, but she thought it would be particularly useful for my chapter on parents.  And, if you look at the chart I made, it’s true that most of the connections I make suggest as much.  So, conclusion is: Steiner is useful for me, and it’s clearly marking a (rhetorical theory) direction I’m trying to go, but it’s probably not the best rhetoric-anchor for my project.  The director and I are agreed on that one. 

So, I thought about this for about five minutes, and it occurred to me that I had already flirted with an excellent framework.  So, I can’t really call this an epiphany or the eureka, because I thought about a lot in the past few months, it just never made it into draft.  I didn’t have the clarity to see all the ways it could be useful to me.  But, with time away from the draft and with some feedback from the director, it occurred to me as clearly as anything ever has.  My project is about Rhetorical Listening.

Many of you are probably familiar with Krista Ratcliffe’s excellent book Rhetorical Listening: Identification, Gender and Whiteness. I read this book in a seminar I took in the Spring of 2006, and it was, without a doubt, one of the two best books I read in grad school (the other being Catherine Prendergast’s Literacy and Racial Justice).  I later read the book for my comps, and then I’ve read it again over the past few days. In the book, Ratcliffe develops listening a trope of interpretive invention, i.e. a method of understanding discourses across cultures and communities.  She interrogates the idea of identification and disidentification: what happens when people agree or disagree with each other?  But Ratcliffe goes further, complicating what is often a simple notion of identification (represented by overlapping circles).  She recognizes that identification is not always a “clean” process.  There are often troubled identification and disidentifications, marked by power differentials, troubled histories, and ignorance. Often, differences are subsumed for the sake of commonality, which opens up possibilities for injustices, hegemony, and perpetuations of status quos.  Identification, as we (with the help of Burke) have conceived it, causes us to foreground commonality and background differences. 

But what if we could foster solidarity and understanding without backgrounding differences?  What if we could understand both commonalities and differences?  What if we could be concious enough to forge some conscious identifications, even in the face of great differences? Ratcliffe argues that Rhetorical Listening is what must precede conscious identifications.  In this way rhetorical listening moves us toward “a code of cross cultural conduct.”

Those of you who know my project might already see the ways I might use this trope throughout my project.  In any event, I’ll explain my understanding of Rhetorical Listening and how it applies to my project more throughly in the next post. 

In a meeting I had with the director on Friday, I told her that I wanted to use Rhetorical Listening as my method to reframe this proejct as a rhetoric project.  She was thrilled.  She thought it was a perfect idea, and that makes me happy.  I’ve been re-energized by this development.

On Blurbing

On Monday, October 22, after working for several hours everyday for a long time, and after working all weekend and all day that Monday, I turned over the first draft of my prospectus. This was a big step for me. I first started thinking about this project in late March/early April, the journey to one intelligible project idea has been very hard for me. My project is about autism advocacy, a huge topic that affects me profoundly from a personal standpoint. Because I am so personally connected to this project idea, I’ve kept my cards very close to my chest (I’ve been using that phrase a lot!). I’ve had conversations with my director about it, and these conversations have been encouraging and positive and helpful, but turning in the draft represents the first time I’ve turned in some that tries to articulate a rationale, a beginning, a middle, and an end–a complete project and how such a project might be situated in Rhetoric and Composition and other areas like disability studies and new media theory. In my final push for a draft to hand over, I just had to do it–make some conclusions, say some projections, speculate about specifics, etc., for the sake of getting this document out and moving on to a part of the project where I can actually do some real research and figure things out where they matter.

It’s been 10 days since I turned over my draft, I haven’t heard back from the director. I’m not upset, just anxious. Not only do I want to see what she thinks, I want to keep working on this project. It had become such a big part of my daily routine, but I can’t work on it right now. I need to wait to see what she thinks about direction I’m taking. I need to breathe. I need to be able to come back to my writing with fresh eyes.

I also need to work on my blurb. People have told me that I need to have about three dissertation blurbs for different social situations. The easiest blurb, I’d guess, is the one that can be written out in a few paragraphs, explaining the project’s overall impetus and the section by section breakdown. Kinda like a shortened version of the prospectus. I also, however, need to work up a 30 second and 3-5 minute blurbs for when people ask me what I’m doing my dissertation on. Whether I give the 3o second or 3-5 minute blurb depends on who’s doing the asking and what their interest level is. Right now, I simply don’t have 30 second blurb that I’m happy with, one that doesn’t completely over-simplify/underexplain–even for 30 seconds. On the other hand, my attempts at 3-5 blurb attempts always end up being too long and convoluted. Clearly, the more I understand my project, the better I’ll be able to talk about it, but this is also something I can choose to work on as well. Here’s an attempt that the 30 second blurb.

I’m looking deeply and critically at the autism epidemic that you may have heard about, not from a scientific standpoint, but from a language standpoint. I’m arguing that in addition to a drastic increase in diagnoses of autism, knowledge-making and advocacy discourses about autism have become more diversified and complicated, involving many stakeholders, from scientists, to parents, to autistic individuals themselves. I’m using Rhetoric and Composition studies as a lense to show the depth of autism discourse. More specifically, I’ll be showing in turn how autism might look considering the aims, methods, and agenda of several sub-fields of Rhetoric and Composition: Rhetorical Theory (Chapter 1); Literacy Studies (Chapter 2); Writing Studies (Chapter 3); New Media Writing Studies (Chapter 4); and Composition Theory (Chapter 5). In all, I’m considering Rhet/Comp as a broad field of inquiry to look deeply into the complex discursive realm of autism.

So, that’s the first attempt. More work on this later.

I’m back

It wasn’t the right time for blogging before, but now it is.  My friend, Kurk, is blogging along with his dissertation project.  As I was making a comment on one of his posts the other day, it occurred to me that I was inadvertantly hi-jacking the conversation he started and talking about my own research interests.  That’s not completely true, the topic overlapped both projects, especially since he invoked autism, which is the center of my project.

 Anyway, I turned in the first draft of my prospectus one week ago today.  My director will give me feedback, and hopefully I’ll do one more draft, give it to my committee, have a meeting with them, and be on my way, fully dissertating.  Over the last week, though, I’ve had to surrender my writing and await feedback.  It’s been completely disorienting.  I’ve held my cards so close to my chest as I’ve written my prospectus.  This project is so personal and important to me.  I’ve received feedback from my writing group, but that’s it.  It’s not that I’m nervous about it, but the stakes have slightly raised now.  In a funny way, I’ve missed writing this last week.  I haven’t written because I don’t know what kind of feedback I’ll get from the director.  But, as commenting on Kurk’s blog reminded me, I could rejuvenate this blog for some low stakes, idea-organizing, information-collecting writings.

That’s the plan.