Identity matters: schooling the student body in academic discourse

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identity matters

identity matters schooling the student body in academic discourse

DONNA LeCOURT

S t a t e Un i v e r s i t y o f Ne w Yo r k P r e s s

Published by S TAT E U N I V E R S I T Y O F N E W Y O R K P R E S S ALBANY © 2004 State University of New York All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher. For information, address State University of New York Press 90 State Street, Suite 700, Albany, NY 12207 Production, Laurie Searl Marketing, Michael Campochiaro Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data LeCourt, Donna, 1963– Identity matters : schooling the student body in academic discourse / Donna LeCourt. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 0-7914-6055-X (alk. paper) — ISBN 0-7914-6056-8 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Critical pedagogy—United States. 2. Multicultural education—United States. 3. English language—Study and teaching (Higher)—Social aspects—United States. 4. Education—Biographical methods. I. Title. LC196.5.U6L43 2004 370.11'5—dc22

2003055625 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For my parents and all the “Edgies”

Contents

acknowledgments

ix

introduction

1

chapter one MATERIAL CONDITIONS OF IDENTITY POLITICS, OR HOW IDENTITY MATTERS IN PUBLIC AND ACADEMIC DISCOURSES

13

interchapter one : HOME PLACES

34

chapter two ACADEMIC DISCOURSE AND SUBJECT PRODUCTION: TOWARD A TECHNOLOGY OF POWER

37

interchapter two : LEARNING MY CLASS

70

chapter three TURNING OURSELVES POWER, AND DESIRE

INTO

SUBJECTS: IDENTIFICATION, 73

interchapter three : THE IMPOSTER

IN

ME

100

chapter four COLONIALISM, CAPITALISM, AND COMPOSITION: STRUCTURAL LIMITATIONS ON COMPOSING IDENTITIES

105

interchapter four : LOSS

140

AND

GAIN

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contents

chapter five THE TURN TO IDENTITY: MULTIPLICITY MATERIAL RELATIONS OF POWER

AND

interchapter five : MY BLINDNESS

AGENCY

WITHIN

143 190

chapter six WRITING MATTERS: REVITALIZING AGENCY

193

appendix

223

notes

225

works cited

229

index

239

Acknowledgments

No one writes alone, and the collaborators on this project were many since Identity Matters represents the fruition of ten years of work, spanning my graduate work at Ohio State University, my nine years at Colorado State University, and my new position at the University of Massachusetts. Although little remains from my dissertation in this book, I owe a special debt to my dissertation committee: Andrea Lunsford, Nan Johnson, and H. Lewis Ulman. Andrea’s influence deserves special mention; she serves as a model of the kind of scholar I hope to be. I am also grateful to many friends and colleagues involved in earlier versions of this work who had inestimable influence over both my thinking and writing: Carrie Leverenz, Todd English, Heather Graves, Mindy Wright, Kelly Belanger, Susan Kates, Amy Goodburn, Paul Trembath, and Chip Rhodes. I owe a special thanks to my composition colleagues at Colorado State University and the University of Massachusetts: Michael Palmquist, Kate Kiefer, Stephen Reid, Charlie Moran, Marcia Curtis, Peggy Woods, and Anne Herrington. Their collegial presence remains an inspiration to me and a continual source of support. To those who listened to my ideas with such infinite patience, I express my sincere gratitude, especially to Kimberly Town-Abels, Sarah Rilling, and Laura Thomas. I am deeply appreciative, in particular, of Sarah Sloane, an extraordinary friend and colleague for her generous and challenging readings of this manuscript. Thanks as well to Priscilla Ross at the State University of New York Press for her support of this project. I am also deeply indebted to the literacy autobiography writers, whose texts continue to provoke me to find new insights, and to my students, who never fail to inspire me in their commitments to social change and their honesty about my pedagogies. Finally, and most importantly, I offer sincere thanks to my parents, Doris and Charles LeCourt, who never fail to encourage me in any way they can.

ix

Introduction

This book began, as so many of my professional endeavors do, in my teaching practice and my own experiences as a student. In particular, it began in stories of failure and frustration, from an attempt to better understand what was taking place in my classrooms and why I was so invested in the pedagogies that kept failing me. From practice, I was led to theory, but theory does not begin in the academy; it begins in everyday interactions and reactions. It begins in autobiography. It becomes a search for understanding that which everyday realities or accepted ways of thinking cannot explain. I introduce this text, then, as I began it: in the narratives of my teaching and school history that continually shadow the more theoretical work that makes up so much of the following chapters. LEARNING FROM FAILURE: MATERIAL AND DISCURSIVE IDENTIT Y RELATIONS

Because I grew up in a working-class, inner-city neighborhood, school was not always a friendly place. My childhood friends knew this even better than I did. Many of them dropped out as soon as possible, explaining that “school had nothing to offer” them or their lives. For my own part, I was suspended for drinking on school grounds, delighted in smoking illegal substances during lunch, and was frequently accused of “mouthing off.” Despite these seemingly predictable experiences (after all, we are constantly told how “at risk” students like me are in our school systems), I also loved school, learning, and books. The combination of these experiences propelled me to become a teacher. Unlike so many teacher candidates I now see in my classes, my inspiration came not from a desire to model my most influential teachers (and there were some) but to be as different from them as I could be, to change curriculum and instruction in ways that would benefit my early peers who so quickly became disenfranchised from school (only about 20 percent of my sixth grade class went on to get a high school diploma). With these goals in mind, I began my teaching career over fifteen years ago. My first full-time position was teaching basic writing to inner-city Chicago students who were enrolled in a special program called CHANCE: an opportunity to illustrate a potential not evident in the traditional requirements for university admission (SATs, grades, etc.). My second position found me in inner-city Boston, 1

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teaching in an alternative high school for returning drop-outs, those expelled from Boston Public Schools, or those BPS recommended for an alternative setting, usually ex-gang members and expectant mothers. Given the structural inequities of our education system, these environments were also highly multicultural. It was not unusual in either institution for mine to be the only white face in the classroom. If there were others, they were students like I once was, primarily from Southie (the neighborhoods in the South End of Boston made famous in the movie Good Will Hunting). Although I now teach in an institution where the majority of students are white, middle-class, and suburban, my early experiences as teacher and student continue to inform my pedagogies and what I hope to accomplish through the teaching of writing: the strategic use of the very identity differences that so marginalized my friends and my students as a source of agency to alter power relations. I hope that my students, through enacting their differential relations to culture, can bring the agency they possess—fostered by fluid identities forged in multiple discourses—to bear on acts of writing. If my pedagogies can encourage students to be critical readers and writers of culture, their ability to question how their own identities have been constructed within ideology will incite a critical sense about those ideologies and their ability to alter them. Such critical acts of understanding, I presume, will then translate into material and discursive action whereby students will seek solutions to social problems, or at the very least, reconsider their own investments in them. Although admittedly lofty goals, I am certainly not alone in my attempts to connect writing to culture, identity, and social justice. I am also not alone, I fear, in how miserably I often fail in doing just that. What I’ve come to realize, via my failures, is that there was a missing element to how I have both theorized and attempted to enact these goals: the student herself and how she lives and experiences culture as body in the material world. In focusing so much on difference as a theoretical concept, I overemphasized the discursive role of identity, forgetting what my own past should have consistently reminded me of: We don’t live identity only in a discursive realm, we live it in interactions with other people in cultural spaces continually overdetermined by material realities of poverty, racism, violence, and threat as well as the more corporeal investments we have in maintaining particular social relations with others. We live identity, that is, as social beings, as bodies, not just minds. At one point, I knew this, or more accurately, felt it to be true. I understood, that is, why so many of my friends dropped out of school; they did so in favor of maintaining alliances with the culture we grew up in, one which seemed diametrically opposed to the one school was asking us to inhabit. Those of us who stayed in school attempted to maintain these social alliances through our clothing; we girls deliberately marked our difference through army pants, workboots, and “big hair” while the middle-class students marked their bodies in the preppy styles of the late 1970s. Leaving school, my friends understood,

introduction

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was to opt out of the middle class. While never an explicit choice to be materially oppressed, the continual remarks that “school has nothing to offer me” suggest an implicit choice to remain aligned with culture as it is currently being lived (e.g., Ogbu; Willis). My early childhood friends understood that culture is not only an act of perception or construction, it is also a material experience in the world that allowed one to do certain things: to maintain social ties, to seek out forms of success, to desire certain modes of being. Only when reimagined within this understanding of culture experienced materially as body as well as discursively through acts of the mind did I come to understand my students’ resistance to my pedagogy as not their failure, but my own: my own inability to account for the more material influences of culture in a pedagogy focused on discourse as the primary site of identity constitution and social relations. Let me offer two examples of “failure” that have most influenced the rethinking of identity that occupies the following chapters: Sheila and Matt. Sheila’s and Matt’s stories, while indicative of many others’, resonate so strongly for me if for no other reason than my pedagogy, at first, seemed to be so successful for them. I have grown used to the complaints that cultural issues should not be part of a writing curriculum from students who refuse to engage my pedagogy. These students resisted primarily through their insistence that I should be either teaching them to write successfully for other classes or focusing on literacy skills necessary for their future careers. While such admonitions that I was not performing my job appropriately made me uneasy, I found myself dismissing their complaints as further evidence of ideological interpellation. Dismissing the failure of those who never engaged was easy (too easy, as I will explain later); dismissing the failure of those who did engage, like Sheila and Matt, was impossible and bore further scrutiny. Sheila initially appeared to be one of those students for whom my pedagogy had been most successful. In a course primarily designed around critical pedagogy and cultural studies, Sheila wrote scathing and insightful critiques of cultural relations, seemed to understand how ideology created identities such that power could be orchestrated over them more easily, and even took up the challenge of social transformation in her papers, offering suggestions for material change. In a conference toward the end of the course, however, I discovered that my seeming success was not to be. Sheila arrived in the office, at the point of tears, ostensibly to ask for advice about graduate schools. As she began to talk, she explained that my class (Literacy and Cultural Difference) and others she had taken in critical theory had caused her to re-evaluate the role of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in her life. She highlighted how this church’s literacy practices inscribed an ideology with which she wanted to disassociate herself, particularly the practices that had created an oppressive situation for women. As in her papers analyzing other cultural sites, Sheila indicated in these reflections how well she is able to connect social- and self-critique through an examination of the ideological function of cultural signs. Despite this critique,

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she didn’t want to leave the church because doing so would mean “leaving” her husband and children due to her inevitable excommunication. Sheila and I discussed the possibility of becoming a critical member of the church and working toward change, but she saw this option as untenable given the church’s hierarchical structure. I recommended accepting her “school” subject positions and her “church” ones as parts of a multiple subject wherein contradictions need not be resolved, but Sheila rejected my attempt to see the fluidity of identity as part of how culture could be lived. Not reconciling her conflicting positions, Sheila was convinced, would only lead to more of the trauma she’d been experiencing for months. Not surprisingly, this conversation led to others, none of which created a resolution. On the last day of class, Sheila reported that she had reached her own resolution: She was going to pursue a graduate degree in the sciences so that both her professional and religious lives could be continuously foundational. Her only choice, she felt, was to reject outright the critical insights she still felt were “right.” Enacting these insights, however, made her “real” life unlivable. Sheila’s refusal to act upon the critical insights she had discovered in my class was at first incredibly frustrating for me. I had no way of explaining such a reaction. The typical, knee-jerk assumption that I had applied too often to other students—that she was too interpellated by ideology to take up the challenge she had posed for herself—wouldn’t work for Sheila. It was simply too facile a reaction to the emotional trauma Shelia was obviously experiencing; its explanatory power was further undermined by the serious cultural work in which she had engaged all semester. When I came to think about this interaction in more material terms, however, Sheila’s reaction made much more sense: She had chosen to pursue an identity that facilitated her social relations with others. That is, Sheila existed in culture not only as a mind, able to critique culture, but also as a body materially invested in institutional structures (religion, marriage) that mediated and organized her ability to live in particular social relations with other bodies. In this way, my initial reaction proved correct, but with a twist. Sheila was indeed resisting my pedagogy due to her ideological investments, but not investments she was unwilling to critique through a discursive intervention, but rather a felt relation to ideology that manifested itself in investments with other people in the material fabric of her life. Without these ideological investments, her ability to live in the world would inexorably change: She would lose her children, husband, and other family members. Altering the way she perceived the world affected more than her own ability to enact agency; it would change how her body literally lived culture in ways that she, quite understandably, could not accept. Similarly, Matt also continues to haunt me as a highly frustrating “failure” because my pedagogy seemed to work so well for him. Yet, like Sheila, his critical insights led to an equal unwillingness to alter his material relations. Matt, a young white man, continually critiqued the power relations embedded

introduction

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in multiple literacies (with remarkable insight, empathy, and with a sophisticated sense of ideology), but each paper concluded that there was no need for change since the current situation benefited him so well. Why, he continually asked, should he seek to change a cultural situation that predisposed him to the very kinds of success he was seeking? Should he willingly give up his potential ability to care for himself and his future children in favor of an abstract concept of social equity? Matt’s reactions may be typical of others’, but because they contradicted so much of what I had come to know of him, I found his responses as inexplicable as Sheila’s. Matt was an extremely sensitive man deeply concerned about what he saw as the power inequities of our culture. What, then, would lead him to resist seeking ways to alter the power relations he so insightfully described? What I came to realize, of course, was that, like Sheila, more material interactions with culture undergirded Matt’s response. While my pedagogy sought to encourage an examination of multiple power relations—an analysis Matt conducted quite well in his reading of the cultural sites he chose to examine—Matt perceived his own identity more structurally. In his material interactions in the world, Matt, quite accurately, had learned that maintaining his sense of self was inextricable from his ability to support himself financially, to take care of himself as both body and identity. The desire for economic security is literally quite real: Those without financial means are discounted, vilified, and held up to ridicule in our society. To be without money in our society is to be oppressed in the most structural of ways that literally put the body at risk: homelessness, unemployment, poverty, violence. Any threat to the identity that ensured such material success, Matt told me quite clearly in the conclusions to his papers, should be resisted. In such a material realm, Matt correctly intuited that those without means are not afforded the ability to choose or enact identity; only those within the middle class are allowed that privilege. To disrupt his desire for economic success, then, was to ask him to literally opt out of his own agency when read through the material realms of culture he interacts with daily. The interaction of the dominant and marginal encouraged, indeed required, by my pedagogies too often had this result: My attempt to read culture as a local interaction with multiple possibilities was undercut consistently by the more structural concepts of power my students experienced as bodies in the material world. The juxtaposition of dominant and marginal identities I asked them to consider did not necessarily lead to a call for change; rather, it just as often replicated the very power relations it was meant to critique. By listening closely to such resistance, I’ve learned a lot from my students. What I’ve learned most recently is how inadequately my pedagogies address the more material concerns that so deeply impact their lives. By valorizing difference as a means of critiquing power, my pedagogies were ill-prepared for the other ways such an interaction might affect the identity constitution of students who were understandably

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concerned with the very real material benefits dominant discourse offered them. My most resistant students, who I dismissed so easily, kept trying to tell me this. FROM QUESTIONING PEDAGOGY TO QUESTIONING THEORY

What, I had to wonder in the wake of such student reaction, made my pedagogies so consistently neglect these material factors in my students’ lives? The answer was astoundingly simple: I had overlooked the view of culture encouraged by the theories on which they were constructed. Over the years, I have enacted a wide array of pedagogies, consistently revising my practice in response to research and scholarship. I have attempted multicultural pedagogies based in discourse communities, seeking to teach a respect for linguistic and cultural difference through the study of multiple communities. I have taken seriously the challenge to construct my classrooms as contact zones wherein students seek to engage each other’s difference in attempts at border crossing. Most recently, I have been strongly influenced by critical pedagogy and cultural studies, where I try to work with my students on strategies for reading the multiple, and frequently oppressive, meanings our society offers in cultural sites. Despite their obvious pedagogical differences, I finally realized that there was a similar theoretical premise undergirding all my pedagogies: a focus on how discourse constructs identity. I may have moved from a more fixed concept of identity authentically constructed in closed communities to a more poststructural concept of the fluidity of identity, but all these pedagogies sought a discursive intervention— through literate acts of reading and writing culture—into identity constitution. Such an intervention only seemed logical given my role as a teacher of writing influenced by theories that presume identity, reality, and ideology are discursively constructed. The experiences of students like Sheila and Matt, however, are not easily explained through such theory. From them I have learned that identity is also perceived, lived, and enacted in much more material ways, and that my pedagogy was itself blind to these aspects of culture. By relying primarily on discursive conceptions of identity, I, thus, was continually producing my own set of disabling binary oppositions: I emphasized the local over the structural, the discursive over the material, and the mind over the body. Recognizing how ideologically suspect such hierarchies are, I finally had to ask how my pedagogies might be producing student failures through the limits my theory was imposing upon their understandings of culture. It took my students’ reactions and resistance to finally make obvious to me the irony of neglecting the material influences on identity while simultaneously seeking to offer my students a way to impact the social real. In this way, my teaching practice prompted me to reexamine more than my pedagogy: It led me to reconsider the very theories on which such pedagogies were predicated and, conversely, what effect these pedagogies might actually be having on my stu-

introduction

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dents’ identity constitution as students in my classroom. Looking at academic discourse more materially, that is, also led me to consider my own role in the material and my influence on student identity construction itself. Located within an institution as they are, my pedagogies do more than offer interventions into identity politics; they also participate in the social relations supported by these politics. If students perceive their identities through both the material and discursive realms of culture, how do they perceive academic discourse’s role in those social relations? What effect does learning this discourse have on the very identities I seek to highlight as sources of agency? These questions emerge from my suspicion that my own pedagogies may partially explain the reactions they have received. That my pedagogies, in neglecting the material, might also unwittingly participate in supporting structural power relations. That my pedagogies, while seeking to transform identity through ideology critique, might be offering equally oppressive options for constructing it. Such realizations led to the guiding question of this text: What does it mean for our pedagogies if we take seriously academic discourse’s role within the material realms of culture? I take up this question specifically as an issue of identity constitution and its effect on agency. Rather than presuming the fluidity of identity and/or seeing identity as complete ideological interpellation, I attempt to mediate between these two positions. From my students I have learned that my overly discursive emphasis needs to be tempered. In this I agree with Teresa Ebert: Our theorizing of subjectivity and social action may have been overly determined by our discursive turn toward poststructuralism with the effect that the more materialist elements of culture are underplayed. I am not, however, advocating discarding the significant insights poststructuralism adds to our understanding of discourse and identity. The influence of discourse on material reality and identity constitution, after all, is inextricable from our concern with how writing might function as a material intervention into the world. Rather, I take as instructive Rosemary Hennessy’s admonition that the discursive and material can never be seen in opposition, but rather are dialectical and mutually supporting relations: As a discursive category, the social becomes meaning-full within frames of intelligibility, the ideological practices, through which meaning is constructed. The “logic” of the social—or the structures by which social relations are made intelligible—informs every cultural narrative. What counts as the “social” affects whether and how we make connections among activities of various sorts—work and culture, laws and trade. What constitutes the “social” in a culture’s stories affects (and is turn affected by) its distribution of resources and power, categories of value, terms of inclusion and exclusion . . . Understanding the practice of meaning-making as ideology implies that this activity is the effect of struggles over resources and power that are played out through the discourses of culture . . . [language],

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identity matters then, . . . is the necessary and inescapable process of making sense by negotiating the discursive materiality of one’s lived reality. (14).

When we recognize the interconnections of the material and the discursive in this way, we also have to acknowledge that social conditions are not only supported/ constructed by discourse, but also that discursive interactions, like the teaching of writing, are inextricable from the material world in which they operate. The social real impacts the discursive as much as the opposite might be true. Attempting to understand more clearly how the material impacts such discursively constructed pedagogies prompted me to write this book. By focusing on how the discursive and material interact with the teaching of academic discourse to produce and enable identity, I hope to better understand not only why my pedagogies so often fail, but also how I might be (re)producing the very disabling concepts of identity that might explain such failures. In particular, I hope to understand whether my teaching of academic discourse has a socially reproductive effect on how my students perceive and enact their identities rather than offering them the socially transformative understanding of cultural difference I intend. In this way, this book is an attempt to take up the challenge Matt and Sheila posed to me, an attempt to understand how the discursive and the material realms of culture interact in my classes. Through such a new understanding of how the discursive and material interact with a body’s ability to construct identity, my hope is that I can come to reenvision my pedagogy and enact the goals I hold so dear in ways that better intervene into culture as it is lived by my students. The first step to realizing such a goal is to reconsider identity formation as it is constructed within academic discourse. How does academic discourse participate in and/or resist the cultural understandings of identity our students bring with them to our classrooms? Can the local interventions we attempt in our pedagogies stand up to the structural operations of power our students have experienced as bodies in the material world? Only through such investigations, I argue, might we understand how our students embody the multiple, conflicting discourses that we hope to enact in favor of agency, and critically interrogate what role we play in how such identities are formed. Only then might I do better by the next Sheila or Matt who enters my classroom. THE SITE OF INVESTIGATION

To begin inquiring into identity constitution in academic discourse, my investigation turns to students’ own depictions of academic discourse in literacy autobiographies written as a class assignment. In an attempt to uncover what students themselves might say about these interactions and issues, I collected forty-six literacy autobiographies, including all process work, and conducted discourse-based interviews with a smaller subset of these writers. By analyzing what real students say when they reflect on the role that language education has

introduction

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played in their lives, I attempt to situate my concern for pedagogy’s role in constructing identity within the material realms of culture. I turn to student depictions of discourse, that is, as a way of grounding the more theoretical discussions of the relationships among power, materialism, discourse, subjectivity, and identity I explore in this text, attempting to maintain a dialectical encounter between the students’ descriptions and the theoretical explanations we might provide for those descriptions. In the ensuing chapters, then, I examine the ways two student populations—graduate students in English and basic writers—present their interactions with academic discourse in literacy autobiographies written for basic writing courses or graduate seminars at a large midwestern university.1 I chose these two groups because they represent distinct points on a continuum of experience with academic discourse. While the basic writers have had experience—and frequently success—with writing tasks in school up to this point, college writing is a different thread of that discursive realm, one that requires learning new discursive positions. Similarly, the graduate students also have a twofold relationship to academic discourse. Like the basic writers, they are an integral part of the discourse, having successfully negotiated the “thread” of academic discourse that is college writing. However, by seeking to become professionals in English studies, they are also on the margins of the discursive realms reserved for teachers and scholars. Thus, both these groups of writers have special insight into the nature of academic discourse. When writers approach a new manifestation of discourse, or when difficulties with using a discourse’s language arise, they become more aware of a discourse that is exterior to their sense of self. This awareness allows the writers more insight into the ways in which academic discourse may be seeking, or has sought, to act upon them. This type of analysis follows Sharon Crowley’s assertion in A Teacher’s Guide to Deconstruction that writers unfamiliar with certain manifestations of a discourse are “more in touch with the flow of différance” than are more experienced writers (35). Crowley hypothesizes that “inexperienced writers” perceive différance more clearly because they “find their own voices simply drowned out by those of teachers and other sources of discursive authority” (35). In other words, the self is more easily erased by the intertext into which it is trying to write itself. Such a sense of différance also gives the writers, particularly the graduate students, perspectives from which to view their ongoing immersion in academic discourse and the consequences of that immersion on their current sense of self and use of language. It is this unique position that makes these texts so valuable for an inquiry into identity constitution and its effects on agency. They give us something much different than literacy autobiographies published by professional scholars (e.g., Rose; Gilyard, Voices). Although I have learned much from these works, they come to us as testaments about past relationships rather than the reflections of one currently immersed in the very processes I seek to inquire into. Since my goal is to understand the process by which identity is constituted

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and enacted in relation to academic discourse, texts written while still a student offer more insight into the specificities of identity formation. Further, the students take up these interactions on their own terms and in relation to their own experiences in the social real. Rather than theorizing identity, the students offer narratives of how they have experienced and lived identity, commenting explicitly on how those experiences interact with academic discourse. As a result, they offer significant insight into the material relations that so concern me here. I grant that my own theorizing of these texts could interfere with these representations, but I do not want to overstate this concern. The truth-value of the texts’ experiences and the preservation of the writers’ intent are moot points in this analysis. The autobiographies serve as artifacts wherein public and academic languages for understanding material interactions with culture merge; thus, the autobiographies should not be viewed as authentic representations of voice. Instead, they highlight the nature of discursive interactions in a historical moment, telling us as much about discursive-material relations as they do about individual writers. A NOTE ON TERMINOLOGY

In analyzing the literacy autobiographies, I also employ a terminology specific to the perspective I am taking here. This terminology attempts to acknowledge academic discourse’s imbrication and connection to multiple discourses in American society as well as its specificity and multiplicity within academic institutions. Thus, my use of the term “academic discourse” refers not to a closed system of discursive relations as has been posited in discourse community theory nor to “one discourse among many” as in theories of the contact zone. Rather, academic discourse in this discussion designates part of a discursive formation that limits and defines a certain discursive realm that is inseparable from the other discourses with which it interacts. In short, academic discourse is not a totality unto itself; it is a segment of a larger discursive presence that operates within U.S. culture. However, academic discourse is distinguishable in its production of particular uses and forms of language, epistemologies, objects of knowledge, and institutional relations. In this way, language is a part of discourse, not its totality. As such, I further distinguish between “discourse” as a broad term indicating epistemological, ideological, institutional, and social relations; and language, as a specific material artifact of a discourse that includes forms of text, speaking, and processes of reading and writing. To prevent confusion, I will refer to the manifestations of academic discourse in writing and speaking as “schooled language,” rather than academic discourse as is frequently done. Schooled language will designate anything written or spoken within the institution for an authority of that institution (e.g., teachers, journals, professional communities, etc.) and serve as a signifier for the type of literacy other discourses (e.g., business, etc.) value because it is perceived as “schooled.”2

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Although academic discourse functions within the larger discursive formation of U.S. culture, my analysis also distinguishes between academic discourse and those discourses students deem more closely linked to home and experience. I will refer to these discourses as “competing cultural discourses.” Like academic discourse, they form part of a larger formation yet are distinguishable through how they circumscribe ways of using language and worldviews specific to material and historical contexts. Because these discourses are not linked directly to an institution, they are harder to define. I presume, however, because of the research into their manifestations, that they are linked to culturally determined groupings of persons, most probably influenced by race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, gender, region, and religion (e.g., Heath, Shirley Brice; Street; Moss). Although I am forced by the nature of our language to depict these discourses in my discussion as separate entities, they may, and probably do, share similarities with academic discourse, yet they do not define the same part of the formation. OVERVIEW

Through the literacy autobiographies, I explore how the discursive and material interact in constituting student identity and analyze the effects that identity formation may have on our attempts to enact the agency that lies in cultural difference within socially transformative writing pedagogies. To investigate this question, I move continually back and forth between the theoretical and the real, putting the literacy autobiographies and the cultural theories I use into constant dialectical relation with one another. Similarly, I seek to put the material, embodied experience of culture into constant conversation with our discursively influenced theories about identity and how it is experienced/enacted. I begin this investigation with just such a conversation, then, between the various rhetorics made available for understanding identity in both the public and academic realms, arguing in chapter 1 that composition’s discussions of identity and agency are continually marked by tensions that are historically concurrent with, and evocative of, public identity rhetorics. Chapter 2 turns more explicitly to the literacy autobiographies, examining what theory of discourse and subjectivity might best explain the interactions with academic discourse the autobiographies put forth. In this way, chapter 2 also sets up a theoretical concept for discourse that guides the ensuing chapters. Chapter 3 offers a more materialist explanation of the relations the students describe in an attempt to understand the structural power relations that affect the literacy autobiographies’ descriptions of discourse. Specifically, chapter 3 focuses on the material-discursive construction of desire as an embodied element of culture in how students perceive their options for identity construction, both in academic discourse and capitalist society. Chapter 4 brings the discursive and material back into conversation with one another, looking at how the material influences of capitalism function in conjunction with academic discourse to “mark” the possibilities for identity in the precise categorical relations offered in the public

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realm. Using postcolonial theory, chapter 4 examines how the linguistic marking of difference in a self/Other relation creates possibilities for identity formation that accord with the power relations to which identities are subjected in the social real. Finally, chapter 5 considers the consequences of such linguistic markings of identity boundaries for how students interpret the potential agency of their other cultural identities, even to the point of erasing that influence in some cases. Relying upon theories of how we experience culture as both body and discourse, chapter 5 attempts to illustrate how social and power relations influence identity formation such that agency is continually undercut. Throughout chapters 2 through 5, I attempt to highlight not only the discursive-material relations that are inciting the student writers to constitute identity in particular ways but also the role composition pedagogy plays, as a central aspect of this discursive-material relation, in how students perceive their identities and their possibilities in the world. As a result, chapter 6 turns more explicitly to pedagogy, offering possible interventions into the processes of identity formation just explicated that might better enact the forms of agency on which our socially transformative pedagogies rely. The chapters that follow, then, are undoubtedly theoretical, employing a diverse range of critical and cultural theories to explain identity formation as both a discursive and material interaction. Yet, the literacy autobiographies continually function both to temper the insights of this theory, and in many cases, to produce new theoretical insights themselves. In this way, I hope to reflect in the text the very interactions of the “real” and the “discursive” that I am attempting to theorize, and to allow theory to emerge from student experience rather than only subject that experience to my theoretical lenses. Finally, a central argument of the text is that all identities, including my own, are constructed within lived experiences. As such, there is also an identity that undergirds all this work, an identity formed within its own material and discursive interactions with public and academic discourses, with the material interactions of the classroom and the frequently abstruse composition theories that guide pedagogy. In an attempt to animate and accentuate the frustrated teacher, the working-class student, and the body I now inhabit, short, personal interchapters appear between each chapter in the text as a way of both disrupting the more academic argument I am constructing and exposing the lived history and material location of its writer. Such interchapters serve as reminders both of the body who is undergoing similar attempts to reconstruct identity as those I hope to offer students and of the material conditions under which this text was produced.

chapter one

Material Conditions of Identity Politics, or How Identity Matters in Public and Academic Discourses

The grand theme of your career may be that the burden of representation is an illusion—a paradigm, par excellence, or ideological mauvaise foi—but that will only heighten your chagrin when you realize that it follows you everywhere like your own shadow. It isn’t a thing of your making, and it won’t succumb to your powers of unmaking—not yet anyway. —Henry Louis Gates Jr., Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man THE DAY AFTER THE L.A. RIOTS a friend called me to cancel our lunch date.

She couldn’t, she explained, be with a white person today. My first reaction was empathetic; in the wake of such a violent occurrence within race relations, my race certainly seemed problematic. Why would an African American woman want to discuss such a volatile racial event with her white friend? Could I possibly understand her perspective if I tried? But, as good a liberal as I was trying to be in this situation, I was also somewhat confused. I wasn’t just any white person—I was Donna, her long-standing friend. Why must she only see race and not our more local relationship? In the way only a white person could, I had hoped we were “past all that.” What I’ve come to realize, of course, is that few of us are “past all that,” no matter how much we want to assume that civil rights and liberal, humanist political actions in the past thirty years have helped us exceed a politics based on race. If I didn’t know this, recent events over the past decade were constantly there to remind me: the Million Man March, the resurgence of white power groups, the O. J. Simpson trial, the dragging death of James Byrd Jr. in Texas, the white reaction to the contention that African Americans were deliberately kept from voting or undercounted in Florida during the 2000 presidential election, the

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persistence of racial profiling despite its illegality, the death of an unarmed African American man by Cincinnati police, which occurred as I wrote this chapter. . . . Such occurrences, of course, come up not only as an issue of race, but of all identity politics categorized around the inescapable classifications of gender, class, race, and sexuality operating in U.S. society that continually appear in shocking events such as the Matthew Shepard murder, school shootings, the Brandon Teena horror, the popularity of groups like the Promise Keepers or Montana Freemen. I could go on, but any American citizen could create such a list. The specific list of events matters not so much as how clearly such occurrences speak to how we are certainly not “past” the politics of identity that have so characterized the end of the twentieth century—neither structurally, as in these national events, nor locally, as in the cancelled lunch date. As startling as such images of violence and inequities are in U.S. society, identity politics also manifests itself in less visible ways. The way we perceive our identities as raced, classed, sexed, and gendered results in particular ways of viewing such events where communication seems to break down. For me, this point was made most clearly in the aftermath of the O. J. Simpson trial. As a feminist, it seemed perfectly logical that I should be critical of the verdict since the crux of the case was the death of a wife at the hands of her husband. In short, I understood the case within the precise gendered terms within which the legal and media discourses presented it. It was murder, plain and simple, and thus obviously wrong, another instance of men using physical strength to dominate women. Yet I found myself surprised that many of my feminist friends disagreed. I clearly recall disturbing conversations with two African American friends, in particular, as they tried to explain why they responded differently, seeing the verdict as a victory in the wake of the historical injustices suffered by African American men in the court system. While one of them was convinced O. J. was guilty, she felt gratified that O. J., as a wealthy man, could access the best lawyers to “beat the system” as so many whites do on a daily basis. His wealth, however, was another sticking point for me. As someone with a working-class background, the idea of “buying justice” rankled, indicating yet another instance of the privilege afforded the rich. In this way, categories of identity, both those we inhabited ourselves and how we understood others to play out in the cultural scene, became almost cards in a game of poker. We went back and forth in our conversation: Race trumped gender concerns for my friends, while gender trumped race for me. Class became the explanation for both injustice and justice, depending on the speaker. Identities functioned as immutably and substantially as if they were, indeed, as real as a deck of glossy playing cards. The ace of clubs could be nothing but the ace of clubs, so categorically did we discuss identity. At a certain point, we simply had to agree to disagree on our reading of the verdict; as hard as we tried to understand one another’s reaction—and we did in most cases—that understanding did not lead to different conclusions.

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Both these conversations after the L.A. riots and the O. J. Simpson verdict encapsulate how inextricable identity politics are from issues of rhetoric. In particular, they illustrate that how we come to understand and perceive identity indelibly affects our ability to discuss such cultural issues, perhaps the most volatile at the dawn of a new century. In these conversations, identity took on two forms. In the case of the L.A. riots, my friend and I perceived identity as a category of body: Physically, we were either white or Black (cultural, discursive encodings for the physical, a way of viewing body within racial categories that, although constructed, also structured our vision). As a physical quality, difference seemed immutable. We presumed that such physical bodies meant we had irreconcilable viewpoints that should not be brought into the open or addressed because of the inevitable conflict they would create. In the second conversation, we made judgments less on the physical body but in ways intimately connected to the same. We assumed our differing experiences of culture led to interpretative strategies wherein our experience of the world and the influence of history upon that experience would inevitably remain dissimilar. Even recognizing the positions we took as culturally constructed (i.e., connected to historical events, personal experience, etc.), we assumed the identities constructed in these spheres to be authentic. If we inhabited a certain body, then we took on particular identities and viewpoints as a result. This authentic link between body and experience, further, helps explain the more physical difference marked in the first conversation: Seeing body as raced immediately meant different identities, different views, the need to end conversation to preserve our friendship. As my friend commented after the L.A. riots, “I don’t think us being together today would be good for our friendship. I’m too angry at white people.” In making judgments based on our races, our classes, and our gender, we were doing much more than mere stereotyping. We assumed similarity (gender) and difference (race, class) to be authentically written on the body through experience. Our interpretations of the world, we presumed, were inevitably linked to how our bodies had been socialized to think in the groupings in which our experience was constructed. In short, we accepted the categorical nature of identity as we had inherited it. Even in our “enlightenment” about the cultural nature of identity, we still presumed its authenticity by concluding that experience would be differentially understood, made meaningful within the communities in which we had experienced it. And we weren’t wrong, as the O. J. Simpson conversation attests. Frankly, only a white person had the luxury of seeing race as a nonissue, as if it need not, in our society, “color” my experience in a way it unavoidably does for people of color. By focusing on class and gender, my whiteness spoke. By neglecting class, my friends’ financial privilege spoke. As women, none of us could ignore gender. We enacted our bodies quite well. Memories of conversations and discussions that have taken these forms over the years greatly disturb me: They are nothing if not stoppages of cultural interaction wherein any potential to “see differently” is interrupted by a logic of

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the body connected to cultural authenticity that seemingly cannot be traversed. Such failures of communication are, pure and simple, impediments to rhetoric and its ability to work in favor of social change. If I thought this were only a personal issue, perhaps I would not be so disturbed, but we see such scenes play themselves out over and over again on the public stage in diverse and seemingly irreconcilable reactions to cultural events. Living in northern Colorado, for example, I am haunted by scenes that played out after Matthew Shepard’s murder (he died in my town’s only hospital). Debates over whether the killing could be considered a hate crime brought out tensions among class issues (did the two men kill Matthew because of anger over their economic plight?) and sexuality (do gays and lesbians “count” as a protected class?). Should class trump sexuality? Could sexuality be factored into legal discourses? Even the funeral became a site of identity politics as mourners had to pass a picket line made up of a religious right group bearing signs reading “Matthew in hell.” On my own campus, one fraternity lost its charter for creating a homecoming float depicting a scarecrow tied to a fence post, obviously invoking how Shepard’s body was found. The exclusively white, presumably heterosexual, middle-class members of the fraternity couldn’t understand why their “joke” had such significant repercussions. The inability to read such events similarly is connected to the body no more clearly than in issues surrounding sexuality. The perception of too many is that the bodies of gays and lesbians exists in such difference that even liberals discuss sexual multiplicity in terms of “tolerance.” Sexual difference is marked so strongly in our society, however, that tolerance need not lead to seeing the body as acceptable—as possessing the same rights to marry, adopt children, access health benefits for partners, or even drink in particular bars. My experiences, no doubt, mirror the experiences of many other American citizens when identity politics makes itself so visible as in these recent events. Such is the scene of identity politics in this country that identity has become a contested site intersected by a seemingly endless number of discourses, by institutional discourses like law and government, experiential discourses of identity and body, economic discourses of business and socioeconomic class, consumerist discourses that allow us to “buy” ethnicity, media discourses that allow us to “travel” among cultures while not being affected, and so on. The sheer diversity of discourses surrounding identity impacts all aspects of our experience in the material realms of culture. Pulling at one thread seems to send a whole ball of yarn toppling toward our heads as we seek to understand how such events continually recur, and how we might prevent the continuing pervasiveness of oppression based in identity. Frustration emerges continually in seemingly unanswerable questions. Will we ever move beyond our current state of identity relations if we continually disregard difference or preserve its authenticity so strongly that no discussion can take place unless we share these same experiences? Whose experience should “trump” the other’s? How do we talk with one another to enact social change within such a scene?

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It is precisely this cultural scene into which so many composition pedagogies seek to intervene. Yet given its complexity, are we up to the task? Public rhetorics lead to a seemingly inescapable identity politics that forestalls our attempt to discuss difference outside of the body. These discourses further impact our material experience of the world and pervade all our social interactions in everyday life, including how we construct, perceive, and enact our own identities materially and discursively. Such politics—both their embodiment and seeming resolution—are so deeply entrenched in our institutions and the material realms of culture that I increasingly fear our attempt to exceed such a politic in the composition classroom may be doomed to failure. Given that academic discourse functions not only in conjunction with these other cultural discourses but also as a prominent institutional discourse, what roles do we play in perpetuating as well as deconstructing the discourses by which we learn and enact identity? How is academic discourse embedded within the scene of identity politics and to what effect on student identity constitution? These are the questions this chapter seeks to take up by illustrating, as much as is possible, the way in which composition itself may be implicated in the very scene of identity politics it attempts to alter. PUBLIC SPACES AND CLASSROOM SPACES

The realm of identity politics has become so central to rhetorical education that we have come to accept that acts of communication take place within and between identities (between and among representatives of discourse communities, or in contact zones created only by leaving our “safe houses”) and, as such, that our attempts to address “public” audiences need to be radically refigured. While we may seek a public rhetoric that might focus on shared investments in certain forms of action, rather than alliances built upon similar identities (e.g., Wells; Harris, Teaching), those actions, of necessity, are similarly located in our interpretations of events, interpretations impossible to separate from identities. Like it or not, identity politics is the playing field of rhetoric at the beginning of a new century. A unitary public is no longer viable; rather the public might better be imagined as that which “require[s] multiple negotiations and positionings for every possible speaker” (Wells 333). One central task of rhetorical education, then, has become that of helping students highlight what those positions might be by providing opportunities where difference is no longer marginalized under a false concept of a unitary consensus about social norms but becomes a possible site of rhetorical action. The presumption is that a better understanding of the cultural nature of one’s own positions will form the grounds through which a new public rhetoric might emerge where students better understand how to negotiate across, within, and between differences in attempts to create a more fully democratic public sphere. These two goals, however, frequently do not operate as well together as we might imagine. Instead, working to highlight

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difference frequently only exacerbates borders rather than encourages one to cross them because of how often our pedagogies incite public understandings of identity that actively work against a rhetoric of communicative action or border crossing. In my past attempts to enact a contact zone pedagogy, for example, my students were just as likely to become more mired in their own positions—in precisely the ways they had come to understand them as a practice of everyday life—as they were to attempt to talk across and between positions. Although contact zone pedagogies are successful in that students come to recognize their experience as a position inscribed by culture, my attempts at contact only made those positions more visible and, paradoxically, more firmly entrenched as a result. Discussions often foregrounded the constructed nature of positions—for example, with comments continually prefaced by “as a white person” or “as an African American.” Students claimed ownership of those positions so vociferously that African American students would claim whites could never “understand” a reading by Cornel West, or female students would tell male students they had no right to discuss an essay on women’s experience. Seeing claims of positionality as a means of discussing difference did not lead to exceeding such positions to traverse boundaries. Frequently, just the opposite was the case. Adding critiques of power to this pedagogical mix helped some students see the role discourse and culture played in this constitution and occasionally exposed the multiplicity of positions available for interpreting culture. Yet, instead of engaging their new understanding of identity to alter social conditions, my students came to see such power relations as not only unavoidable but also necessary for living life in the social real. The cultural currency offered through capitalism, for example, became not a means of explaining oppression but more often a reason to maintain the status quo. If “moving up the social ladder” was the way to ensure material success, it should be pursued; further, it provided a route for others to escape oppression. Class politics were not opportunities for critique; instead, they explained how equality could be achieved. Such rhetorical stoppages, even in pedagogies designed to transcend them, seem to imply that no matter how much “contact” occurs between bodies, borders will not be crossed. To use Wendy Hesford’s terminology, the “autobiographical scripts” that culture makes available for understanding identities locate us in such ostensibly locked positions that borders can seem absolute. My teaching experiences have highlighted well the scripted responses engaged all too often by students. Assuming we should “get past” seeing a difference based in race, or that the only option is to stop engaging, to “agree to disagree,” or that wealth will solve all ultimately reflect many of the strategies my students, when discussing issues of difference, seem to bring up consistently. Ranging from the comments that we are “all the same” (and thus difference should not matter) to an acceptance of difference as indissoluble, yet equal (usually expressed almost precisely as an Arby’s slogan: “different is good”), to the assumption that class

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mobility will alter identity politics, my students, like me and my friends, reflect the cultural rhetorics available in the public sphere for discussing identity. Although we may wish to see such student reactions as failures to engage the contact zones of the classroom, we also have to recognize that such reactions have been well learned in the material realms of U.S. culture. Emphasizing student identity, even when exposing its cultural and ideological nature, does not always allow us to predict what students might bring to the classroom. Rather, it is just as likely that students will invoke the understandings of identity they already use to understand themselves as part of the material world; that is, the public rhetorics of identity that continually categorize bodies such that a particular body is presumed to understand its experience of the world in particular ways. In the logic of identity politics, my white body encodes a variety of assumptions about what I’ve experienced, how I think, and my position of power in culture. Even if I try to exceed those presumptions when I speak, my “body” is read in ways that counter such attempts. In a contact zone, my body speaks as loudly as does my rhetoric. Although discourse theory suggests that identities are occupied in more multiple ways than these examples indicate, identities are too often acted upon as if they were authentic and unified within the cultural categories by which we explain our experience to ourselves and others. While we may wish to enact these multiple subjectivities in favor of other kinds of discursive action, the way we perceive identity frequently prevents such an intervention into culture. These perceptions may be recognized as just that—cultural constructions—but in material interactions, in the social real in which we operate on a daily basis, such perceptions are frequently enacted much differently. Written into our thoughts and feelings, our bodies encode our perceptions of who we are and can be in the world. Rather than only the locus of culture—that which contains the discursive—bodies function, as Peter McLaren explains, as “the central relay point— the point d’appui—in the dialectical reinitiation of meaning and desire” (Predatory 63). The body, that is, experiences and enacts culture as more than a discursive relation, but rather as a confluence of meaning, desire, and affect literally written into the flesh. We learn our identities in discursive relations that mediate experience; we perceive our bodies in their material relation to the world via such discursively constructed identities. Experience and discursivity work in a dialectical relation. McLaren summarizes this move quite succinctly: “Since all experience is the experience of meaning, we need to recognize the role that language plays in the production of experience. You don’t have an experience and then search for a word to describe that experience. Rather, language helps to constitute experience by providing a structure of intelligibility or mediating device through which experiences can be understood” (Predatory 128). This mediation is, further, inseparable from bodies as a material element of experience. How we understand our body’s relation to identity (the physical and social markings by which identities are encoded in the social real) inevitably influences both our

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experience itself and which languages we see as most available to understanding that experience. We see these mutually embedded relations clearly in my reactions to the O. J. Simpson verdict. As a white, working-class woman, my experiences of the world as a body are inseparable from how I perceive these positions. While my whiteness allowed me to ignore race, the experience of the past—and the languages of economic oppression applied to those experiences—could not be separated from how I viewed a material event. Although class is arguably less written on the body, it is enfleshed in multiple ways in my experience. Affectively, it manifests itself in the despair, anger, and violence that frequently accompany economic oppression. Such affective reactions result from the investment of desire in consumer culture, in the presumption of class mobility, in the capitalist credo that class can be exceeded, even while material conditions vociferously cry that it cannot. Physically, it appears most vividly in my images of work uniforms, sweating bodies, and the physical disabilities manual labor has written on my family members’ bodies. Even as I live an ostensibly middle-class existence in the present, I bear this history with me through choice, because of the value I place on maintaining social relations with family and friends who still live a working-class existence. I invest in a working-class identity, that is, as a way of publicly announcing social allegiances to historical relations of oppression, to the local experience of my past, and to the bodies I most value. In this way, our understandings of identity are intimately connected not only to our own body—and how it has been encoded by others—but also our relationships and investments in social relations. We may theorize identities as multiple, but our students do not live only in our classrooms. Rather, any attempt to locate agency in difference will be continually affected by our students’ interactions in culture as it is lived in material interactions with others that may not always be accounted for in our approaches. This is not only an issue of inequitable power relations enacted upon the body in the material world but also one of affect and connection, of the social relations we need to maintain our social lives. As Keith Gilyard has pointed out, the challenge we offer to concepts of authenticity may not be enough to impact the significant influence of the material relations in which such authentic identities are learned. . . . academic postmodernism, including that which gets valorized in composition classes, often gets stuck in passive relativism, just a classroom full of instability. It’s useful at times to complicate notions of identity, but primary identities operate powerfully in the world and have to be productively engaged. I think King had it right, for example, when he dreamed of Black kids and White kids holding hands (219). There are whole realities attached to those Black hands and White hands that have been insufficiently dealt with to date and won’t be if we insist on prematurely converting King’s dream to one of hybridity kids holding hands with junior border crossers. When we engage in discussion about fluidity, we ought

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to keep in mind the question of who can afford to be anchored to a focus on the indeterminate. (“Literacy” 270)

Although identity may be socially constructed through discourse as our invocations of postmodern and cultural theories assume, there are, indeed, “whole realities attached to those Black hands and White hands” that ultimately influence how those identities are experienced. We don’t live identity as discourse; we live identity within bodies. This interaction of bodies and identities in the contact zone also helps explain why so many of our pedagogies do not achieve their intended results. Although I might encourage students to see identity as fluid, as constantly changing and able to cross borders, their sense of themselves as bodies, understood within the particular languages our culture makes available for understanding self, continually reasserts the cultural premise that undergirds so much of our society’s identity politics: body = experience = thought. Within public rhetorics, identities are not fluid but unified within particular cultural experiences. We are presumed to have similar experiences to other bodies “like us” that are understood within similar community discourses for explaining experience. Through such logic, my students firmly identify with particular cultural positions (“as a white person”) that seem to bespeak an entire identity. Even as students come to critique the presumptions they make about identity’s link to raced, sexed, and gendered bodies, such interventions do little to disturb their sense that their own bodies signify and contain who they are as thinking, feeling, desiring beings. My body is how I perceive myself. I have lived in this body for years; it is this body with whom others interact, and through this body that I construct the social relations that sustain me in the material world. My body is not, assuredly, an abstract site that merely serves to give boundary to the multiple discourses impacting my material interactions with the world. There is a substance to body, my students continually remind me, that is not perceived as fluid or discursive. Rather, we live within social relations with others that are perceived as bodily interactions. In this way, our rhetorics and experiences of identity work tautologically. We enact cultural positions in particular ways because we have both constituted and experienced our own selves in those ways. Those positions then produce, almost unceasingly, new rhetorics of identity always limited by the ways we already perceive them. The complicating factor, however, is that such reliance upon authenticity claims does not appear to impact one’s concern for social justice. My students are not reactive in their willingness to recognize oppression or their desire to imagine a better world. Their reactions, that is, cannot be simplistically read as ideological interpellation that facilely accepts current conditions. Rather, their understandings of self and difference, forged in public rhetorics, allow for both thinking categorically and the assumption that we can exceed those categories. My students may act as bodies, but they understand equity as exceeding materiality. Recall that my students also argue for equity

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through concepts of “shared humanity,” “acceptance of diversity,” or “equalizing power relations through capital.” In such arguments, lived experience of the world can be transcended (shared humanity), the power relations such experience invokes negated (acceptance), or inequities addressed easily through current systems (economics). There is a clear conflict here between how my students explain the world in equity arguments and how they experience it categorically, a conflict that emerges from public rhetorics that attempt to both recognize difference and exceed it simultaneously. Public rhetorics, that is, remind us that while we live in bodies, the way to exceed difference is to simultaneously recognize difference and ignore it. The apparent contradiction of an equalizing rhetoric and a body that cannot exceed difference is one that easily hides its potential hegemony. Rhetorically, we can invest in equity arguments where difference does not “matter”; however, in the social real—in the fabric of everyday life—we are consistently reminded that body does indeed matter. It matters affectively in forming alliances with others; it matters experientially in making “our individuality” corporeal; it matters materially in what rights we are accorded and what threat our bodies are exposed to. What we lack is a rhetoric that can discuss such differences without becoming locked into authenticity claims that prevent dialogue, ignore power relations, and attempt to negate history. We are caught, that is, in a world where rhetoric and the material are seemingly opposed. Rhetorical tropes of “diversity,” “humanity,” and “class mobility” seem viable means of impacting the material because they allow us to ignore the very grounds of difference we see and feel in oppressive identity relations. There is a clear mismatch between how we understand identity, even when we recognize its cultural construction, and how we live it. Like any cultural moment, we have inherited this seemingly inescapable paradox from history, most particularly from the highly visible identity politics of the 1960s and 1970s. In the wake of civil rights actions taken up on behalf of African Americans, Latinos, women, gays and lesbians, and myriad other groups, it has become almost impossible not to perceive self—to understand self and its possibilities for being in the world—within the categories we have inherited from such actions. Given the cultural context in which such movements sought to intervene—the assumption of equal opportunity and common humanity organized to privilege only a certain identity (the white, straight, middleclass, male)—such a new understanding of difference was undeniably the appropriate response. Disrupting how we understood identity as irrelevant to action upon the world within such a historical moment could only be accomplished through an attention to collective politics, to the attempt to group difference in order to highlight inequities, while simultaneously moving toward the same telos of universal rights for all. Such an intervention has been successful on many fronts, ending oppressive conditions of institutional segregation by race, creating new laws attempting to erase discrimination, moving many women

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into the workforce, and so on. While resulting in significant advances for many groups—while others still struggle to achieve just these gains (e.g., gay rights’ actions in favor of similar protections under the law)—we also have inherited an understanding of identity (our own and others’) that may prove disabling to the dream of a fully enfranchised democracy, rather than a legal mandate that has been unable to alter social conditions. Women still earn less than men for the same work; people of color still disproportionately make up more of the poor; the middle class continues to shrink as fewer and fewer people possess more and more of the wealth in our country; and most significantly, people still are harassed, molested, attacked, and killed because of their race, gender, and sexuality. Ironically, what we have inherited might be understood most pointedly as a rhetoric of authenticity created through our attempts to respect diversity while maintaining allegiances to universal values (reason, justice), economies (capitalism), and the institutions meant to ensure their perpetuation (law, business, government, education). When we begin thinking diversity, we acknowledge that different cultural experiences, and their encoding in the languages by which we understand experience, come to create diverse cultures within American society. This move to a multicultural society, which attempts to preserve diversity within the ideological structures of a particular nation, encourages a respect for difference within sameness. That is, we recognize different cultural ways of knowing and attempt to count them as equal, while still preserving a link to a national consciousness that we might all be said to share. Events such as the O. J. Simpson trial, however, expose how difficult our attempt to walk this line can be when competing interpretations vie for prominence. Consistently, such events highlight a recurring national issue: how cultural difference can be maintained simultaneously with an allegiance to social institutions that mandate a more unified identity for a nation’s citizenry. As a country, we are consistently pulled in two seemingly opposed directions, toward sameness and difference simultaneously. Little wonder our students’ discussion of identity politics seeks to both respect diversity and assert common humanity simultaneously with little attention given to the power relations that might make such goals impossible. This pull toward a unitary public simultaneous with attempts to respect diversity results in a seemingly endless tension between our attempts to achieve a social consensus and not marginalize any perspectives in the construction of that consensus. As John Trimbur argued so long ago, however, rarely is it possible to achieve consensus without marginalizing others (“Consensus”). Rather than creating a social scene in which difference is respected and valued, discussions of identity presume an authentic link between body, identity, and experience that has resulted in a continual ranking of identities. Once something is appropriately categorized, it becomes much easier to order those categories such that certain identities, whose perspectives most mirror that of dominant discourses and institutions, are continually placed “on top” under the rubric of a unified consensus of rationality and public good. While identity politics has

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given us a language to discuss such moves, it also provides the premises by which such discussions take place, ensuring a replication of power relations wherein some voices speak more loudly than others and some perspectives have more currency than others. Within the goal of sameness, difference is consistently refigured as a battlefield of the public good versus personal or community interest. Recent conservative responses to identity politics reflect this tension clearly insomuch as such responses link claims of discrimination to personal agendas (e.g., accusations of “playing” the race or gender card), or more to the point, as impediments to the pursuit of commonly held goals. The backlash against affirmative action policies and feminism are apt cases on point. Within such rhetorics, power hides. The material facticity of being in the world continually undercuts our goals of sameness and difference as coexisting impulses, but our rhetorics remain to assure us that the mismatch between how we live in the world and how we explain it need not be examined. By seemingly resolving the tensions wherein we act categorically but presume identities need not be categorical, such rhetorics ensure our experience of the world need not impact our understandings of equity. The paradox of difference and sameness becomes resolved through the discursive means offered to explain contradictory experiences of the real world. We may feel oppression, but we can explain it. We may enact self as if borders were absolute, but our rhetorics are there to assure us they can be crossed. Thus, I, like my students, can understand why my friend wants to cancel our lunch date, but still feel that we should be able to get beyond those very differences that I enact myself in response to the Simpson trial. It is in the tension between these two impulses—toward sameness and difference—that we find the confluence of multiple institutional, media, and economic discourses in which our students are asked to forge their identities. While consumerism may benefit from diversity, capitalism works more smoothly within hierarchies and complete investments in the economic system. Although social programs and initiatives (e.g., affirmative action, antidiscrimination laws) may seek equality, the self-same assumption of rational means by which equality can be reached is embedded in a legal system that, by definition, cannot recognize difference unless it is already categorized (i.e., “protected classes”). The integrity of the “one-man-one-vote” society is weighed against accusations of misconduct in Florida. Sameness and difference collide over and over again as impulses toward multiplicity and national good continually vie for prominence in local situations. Much the same occurs in our classrooms as we attempt rhetorics of multiple identities within an institution whose function is to ensure the continuation of the meritocracy, providing a means to equal opportunity while simultaneously rank ordering merit for potential employers. We seek to enact the agency of multiple identities while simultaneously offering new identities through our teaching of accepted literacies that are best able to operate within the institutions of power in our society.

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COMPOSITION AND IDENTITY POLITICS: TRANSFORMATIVE AGENCY OR IDENTITY FORMATION?

This seeming paradox of difference within sameness is one in which composition is deeply implicated. Composition has consistently attempted to take seriously the mandate of equality through a shared language while simultaneously respecting difference and diversity. In its function as the cultural institution dedicated to ensuring meritocracy, higher education in this country is inextricably involved in debates over identities and how they come to gain power. The same can be said of the teaching of writing, dating back almost to the onset of language education in public schooling in the United States. Not surprisingly, insofar as composition studies is located in and responds to the same social exigencies, our pedagogies reflect a historical trajectory of shifting understandings of identity similar to those in the public sphere. Composition’s theories of identity and language attempt to negate the more material affects of identity politics and the institutional power in which our pedagogies are located. In sum, our own history reveals a similar attempt to disassociate the discursive from the material, the rhetorical from the real, and, most significantly, the institution from power relations. Traditionally, American education, more often than not, has been viewed as supporting an egalitarian and liberatory agenda that smoothly intersects with our cultural mythos of democracy and individualism. Hence, some educational historians interpret the move to public education in America as a way to extend social benefits to the lower social classes. Under the rubric of “equal opportunity,” education provided the venue for any American to live the American dream. Not surprisingly, this “egalitarian turn” in education, as Andrea Lunsford points out, also affected a change in the nature of rhetorical education. Lunsford ties this change to the development of land grant institutions through the Morrill Act of July 2, 1862: The land grant universities welcomed a much broader spectrum of the American public than had heretofore had access to higher education, and these students were by and large untrained in Latin and Greek—the traditional languages of the Academy. As the vernacular slowly became the language of choice in all universities, instruction in composition emerged as a powerful means of immersing students in the skillful use of English, at least partially in the belief that the “right and proper” use of the English language was requisite to participation in the intellectual and economic life of the republic. (“Nature” 6)

Thus rhetorical education prepared students, or at least gave them the language, to become part of the dominant culture, providing them with the means for social acceptance within that culture.

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Although expressed in democratic terms, rhetorical education also functioned as a primary form of acculturation, creating identities through the pursuit of a monolingual body politic with similar investments in supporting dominant cultural institutions and values. The discourse taught in schools could be read as an inherent good if education is viewed as providing the linguistic resources with which to become an active member of a valued society. To achieve this status, the student not only learns academic discourse but also becomes a member of the dominant culture through her facility with its language. In this way, language education became linked to instruction in dominant culture, to the desire for a national consciousness characterized by a similar language, worldview, and ideology, learned simultaneously with a discourse that would inculcate such an identity and ensure its reproduction in the public sphere should the student “merit” entrance into positions of power. In its own historical trace, composition, that is, becomes mired in structural relations of power; its institutional location connects writing instruction inextricably to the production of the acceptable ideological citizen, worker, and consumer. In this way, composition in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries participated in the public consensus about identity: Equality could best be achieved through sameness, albeit a route to sameness offered only to men of a particular class and ethnicity. While composition’s history is undoubtedly one of teaching “sameness,” the beginning of what we might call modern composition studies, brought to the forefront during Open Admissions (historically contemporaneous with Civil Rights), also speaks to our concerns with difference. Early on such attempts to enfranchise new groups entering the university resulted in pedagogies aimed at accommodation and acculturation meant to give students the means to compete within the meritocracy through the “sameness” of their language use (see Lu and Horner). Learning academic discourse, that is, served as the precursor to university success, and thus the material and social benefits a university education was meant to confer. The public attention at this time to the “literacy crisis,” for which such admissions policies were partially blamed, mandated such an approach. Yet, as Patricia Harkin and John Schilb have pointed out, such a crisis also resulted in greater attention to the cultural backgrounds of students and a critique of the function of school. Through the influence of work in the ’70s, such as Mina Shaugnessy’s groundbreaking approach to error or resolutions like “Student’s Right to Their Own Language,” we came to recognize the inextricable relationship between language use and cultural identity. Social involvement became the foremost model for explaining reading and writing ability, encouraging us to define literacy as “a growing metacommunicative ability—an increasing awareness of and control over the social means by which people sustain discourse, knowledge, and reality” (Brandt 32). By acknowledging the connection between discursive and social practice, we also recognized the ways in which this literate practice reflects the culture (i.e., knowledge, worldview, and relationship to re-

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ality) embodied in the social relations and histories of various communities: the social real as it is lived in local contexts. In response to such realizations and under the influence of a variety of social discourse theories, pedagogies of the 1980s moved to more liberal approaches based in discourse communities supported by significant research into multiple literacies (e.g., Heath, Shirley Brice; Street). With such pedagogies, we hoped to explain how sameness and difference might exist simultaneously. We could teach academic discourse as a precursor to meritocratic entitlement, while simultaneously acknowledging and valuing the diverse communities from which our students hailed (e.g., Bartholomae; Bruffee; Bizzell, “What”; Dean). Connecting literacy practice to community, identity, materiality, and ideology, however, also led to some disturbing questions about the effects of teaching academic discourse itself. If identity was forged through discursive-material interactions in a given community, then how is identity constituted when students begin to operate in many communities? Recognizing the connection between ideology, discourse, and identity, in sum, raised the question of how the varying power relations among discourse communities within the social real might affect the ongoing process of identity formation. Reflecting on the significant status academic discourse holds in culture, Patricia Bizzell perhaps encapsulates this concern best when she considers that academic discourse could rewrite identity in favor of dominant culture, even within a curriculum acknowledging the multiple discourse practices and worldview of other communities (“What”). Such a concern, however, occupied composition scholars for only a relatively short time, as we quickly backed off from the implications such a question provoked. In our concern for difference, we came to occlude our implication in producing sameness that characterizes so much of composition’s history. We held out hope, that is, that sameness and difference could be pursued simultaneously, lest we risk questioning how composition’s democratic agenda—now refigured as the preservation of multiple identities—might impact the meritocratic value of learning academic discourse, and thus our expertise in and commitment to teaching that discourse. Even Bizzell, in the very essay where she raises this question, backs off from its potential implications. While Bizzell admits that academic discourse, because of its societal status, “makes a strong bid to control all of a student’s experience,” she still claims that the goal of pedagogy is to make students “bicultural,” able to move between an academic and a “home” discourse (“What” 299, 298). Even though she concedes the power of academic discourse and refers to the school “as an agent of cultural hegemony,” Bizzell continues to argue that the dominance of a certain discourse community does not have to equal a conversion (“Cognition” 237). With the influence of Joseph Harris’s Braddock award-winning essay, “The Idea of Community in the Study of Writing,” the conviction that composition could honor both difference and sameness simultaneously became readily accepted. In this essay Harris criticizes those who describe acclimation to academic discourse as a process of being “born again”

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(16) by arguing that such a description falsely polarizes the academic community and other “common” communities. Instead, Harris argues that acclimation to academic discourse is not an initiation but an addition to a student’s already complicated language. Under this view, composition came to see the boundaries of communities as constantly shifting, while individuals were imagined to “cross and recross” boundaries continually, “joining other communities one moment, returning to a ‘home’ community the next” (Porter 216). Despite evidence that such border crossing is not always possible (e.g., Brodkey, “Literacy Letters;” Balester; Malinowitz), the conclusion to this 1980s debate now infuses most composition theory. Academic discourse came to be seen as providing an “addition” to an already complicated identity that was written within multiple experiences and languages such that the writing subject could, in the ’90s, be reenvisioned as a site of multiple and conflicting discourses (see Faigley). Composition came to see the classroom as a space of multiple, interacting discourses where the fluidity of the subject could exceed its given cultural inscriptions to become a critical agent capable of rewriting culture. Relying on the fluid subject and the multiplicity of discourse did not negate the concerns about power evident in the 1980s. Instead, multiple power relations became the precise means by which agency could be achieved and ideological interpellation resisted. Berlin and Vivion summarize this point well: While writing “may result in a simple accommodation to hegemonic codes, . . . it usually involves a negotiated transaction and even resistance. In other words, cultural codes are rarely totally predictable in their effects on lived experience” (x). Because all local contexts are overdetermined by multiple discourses interacting within a given moment, a single writing context produces a variety of subject positions that have the potential to both interpellate the subject ideologically and/or provide spaces wherein that inscription can be resisted. In this view, the contexts available for writing subjects are probably best imagined as “leaky sites of struggle and ongoing negotiation where no outcomes can be guaranteed in advance” (Trimbur, “Postmodern” 130). Enacting the possibilities for agency, as a result, relies on the subject’s ability to see culture as “leaky” by mobilizing the multiplicity he brings to any cultural production, including acts of writing. While community-based pedagogies focused on “preserving” difference as a site equal to academic discourse (a diversity concept of multiculturalism), more recent approaches focus on bringing “people out of their various ‘safe houses’ and into a ‘contact zone’” (Harris, Teaching 120) imagined as a site of conflict (Pratt) or negotiation (Harris) where multiplicity could be engaged. Other pedagogies take this premise of the multiple subject beyond contact to a critique of culture wherein students learn to reread the cultural scene in favor of social transformation (e.g., Berlin; Fitts and France) or reread their own identities as constructed in particular historical and ideological relations as a way of engaging the agency of the subject (e.g., Hesford; Brodkey, Writing). In these pedagogies, our chief concern about identity is activating its potential for agency, its poten-

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tial to exceed particular discursive inscriptions in favor of action leading to social transformation. Although the route to such agency is hotly debated, our concerns for social empowerment have become aligned with the ability to critique culture and activate difference in favor of rewriting the world. Power relations are central to such concerns, yet the power of academic discourse to constitute identity introduced as a central issue in the 1980s has largely been elided by a focus on the fluidity of subjectivity. Examining our current focus on social agency within history and the social events to which it is reacting, however, makes it difficult to relegate questions of identity constitution to theoretical presumptions about its additive effect on student identity. Rather, in this admittedly cursory and deliberately interpreted history of composition, we see mirrored the continual attention to sameness and difference that characterizes much of our current public rhetorics about identity politics. Since the inception of modern composition studies, the teaching of writing is figured as a site of both sameness and difference: as the site of learning national consciousness, while simultaneously attempting to negotiate the minefield of contemporary identity politics through attention to the variety of cultures that make up this nation. Given these connections between public rhetorics of identity and the goals of composition pedagogy, I have to ask whether our current reliance on the variety of identities and the mixed, contested array of discursive positions available to our students is an appropriate intervention into such a cultural scene. Identities are, as so many have theorized, multiply constructed in varying relations of power, yet can we presume that identities forged within such power relations can be felt and enacted as sites of agency given the significant influence of more material interactions in the social real and the public rhetorics through which we are encouraged to understand identities? TEACHING WRITING/TEACHING IDENTITY: DISCURSIVE IDENTITIES IN MATERIAL RELATIONS

What guides this question is a concern that we may have neglected power’s more material effects in our search for agency within identity and culture. Composition’s focus on the fluidity of subjectivity, that is, reveals a deep entrenchment in discourse theory that, while seeking to take the material into account, relegates the materiality of social life to secondary status. The discursive encodes the material, writes the body, and thus, the way to impact the material is to analyze discourse, to see oneself as a discursive construction, and to alter one’s rhetoric to change the world. While I am in complete sympathy with these objectives, I worry that we may have also created a causality loop (discourse = the “real”) that can lock us into a binary relation between the discursive and the material, limiting our ability to understand our own role in identity construction and our students’ experiences as body in the material world. Privileging discourse over the material, in short, exposes not only a

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potential inability to intervene into our student’s understandings of identity but also the material role academic discourse plays in helping create the very hierarchies to which our students are subjected. Theories focused on the discursive construction of subjectivity, for example, are too easily undercut by the ways in which our students experience identity authentically in material relations and the categorical public rhetorics through which they are encouraged to understand that experience. Multiple identities, we must always remember, result as much from unequal power relations in history (and in the present) as from the panoply of signs and discourses that characterize our post-Fordist, consumerist society. Although constructed via discourse, there is also a material history to that discourse that is inseparable from body. As Stuart Hall puts it so succinctly, “identities are the names we give to the different ways we are positioned by, and position ourselves in, the narratives of the past” (qtd. in Gates xiv). Part of that positioning is physical. Skin corporeally connects us to the past: “Different shades, textures, and feel of skin” serve as “testimony both to the subjective state of individuals and to the histories that have molded them; of fair Aboriginal skin as a document of the planned erasure of black skin; of the muddied skin of the white working class”(Probyn, “Eating” 87). We cannot escape skin, sexual organs, or the way discourses read our bodies through the lens of history. Such identities, as a result, are continually subjected to unequal power relations as part of everyday experience. Presuming we can exceed these positions discursively through multiple subjectivities deflects attention from these inequities, aligning composition theory with public rhetorics that seek to disassociate power from equity. Although certainly not a “common humanity” argument—in fact, its antithetical position is what allows it to seem such a positive social intervention—the presumption of multiplicity functions similarly to focus attention on the mobility of the subject rather than its ability to be fixed within structural power relations. Although identities may be multiple, they are perceived and enacted categorically and authentically with significant material effects. Henry Louis Gates Jr. illustrates the paradox of the constructed nature of identity versus how it is lived and enacted quite clearly: “One is not born a woman,” Beauvoir famously wrote; and neither are you born a man, or a black, or the conjunction of the two. But what good does that do you? You can rebel against the content of an identity you didn’t get to choose—and yet badly stitched vestments are not easily cast off. . . . Hence the appeal of that comforting old lie: I’m not a black x (poet, president, whatever), I’m an x who happens to be black. Alas circumstance won’t have it so. Nobody happens to be black: this is a definitional truth. For a world in which blackness is elective or incidental—a world where you can “happen to be” black—is a world without blackness, a world, that is, where the concept has been dismantled or transfigured beyond recog-

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nition./ So you might inveigh against, say, the ideology of authenticity, but in some measure you participate in it all the same. (xvii, original emphasis)

If one’s body is coded as raced within the social real (or gendered, classed, or categorized in myriad other ways), one is inevitably forced by the reactions of others to inhabit such categories authentically. Within a society that codes identities categorically, perceptions of one’s own identity cannot escape such encoding. Our rhetorics of identity, in short, are us, and thus, inevitably affect our attempt to act upon the world and define self. While multiple options exist, we do not necessarily perceive them within the structures imposed upon our identity within the material world. Similarly, while power may function in multiple relations, it is just as often felt, enacted, and perceived structurally as part of everyday life. Theoretically, I may want to dispute the more structural effects of power, but the ways identities are treated and enacted does not allow such a vision. Just ask a single mother thrown off welfare, or a woman sexually harassed by her boss, or a young Black man “profiled” by the police whether power relations of identity aren’t experienced structurally quite often. Seen as part and parcel of such a cultural scene, the interaction of structural and poststructural concepts of power are no less relevant to how we might imagine the power academic discourse wields through its institutional role in the social real. As Hesford argues, there is a danger in “romantic[izing] the primacy of the local” and seeing “local sites as independent from larger power structures, social relations, and discourses” (xxii–xxiii). One of those dangers may lie in assuming such local relations can obviate the potentially oppressive function academic discourse may play in constituting identity. Our theories, that is, again correspond with public rhetorics, attempting to disconnect our material location—in institutions of school—from the normalizing function schooling is purported to serve. Through our focus on discursive theories, for example, we are assured that occupying positions inscribed through academic discourse need not affect the multiple subject’s agency. Instead, we hold out hope for difference within sameness, enacted by the very students who seek to gain the material benefits schooling can accord. Never innocent about power, composition still tries to situate itself in opposition to the very institution that forms its material function in culture, relying upon the instability of power relations to ameliorate our potentially more oppressive role in identity politics. That our pedagogies’ attempts to see identity as performative and rhetorical could easily be undercut by the larger power structure in which schooling functions, however, must be taken seriously. Far from a successful intervention into such a scene, composition’s focus on the fluidity of subjectivity could easily be co-opted by public rhetorics as yet another assurance that difference can exist simultaneously with sameness. Connected as it is to public rhetorics of equality through class mobility, academic discourse is well positioned to seem the “way out” of inequitable power relations while simultaneously maintaining one’s primary alliances.

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Ignoring the potential that our pedagogies might also be creating identities in accordance with the options available in public discourses, frankly, concerns me a great deal. I fear our quick turn away from these questions in the 1980s may not have been only a theoretical turn, but one in which we could, albeit unwillingly, absent ourselves from literacy’s reproductive function in favor of seeing ourselves as supporters of difference. In making such a claim, I do not want to negate the significant contribution that such pedagogies have made in offering multiple ways to intervene into identity politics. In our fervor for creating equitable and critical pedagogies, however, I suspect that we may also have unwittingly allowed ourselves an “out” whereby our own role in constructing identities continuous with dominant ideology may have been given short shrift. By attending so closely to questions of agency and social transformation, composition has not looked closely enough at the more oppressive function academic discourse might serve. If we imagine students’ experience of identity as a body who desires and experiences in both discursive and material interactions, however, we also have to acknowledge that the fluidity of the subject could potentially be undermined by its experience as body and social being. Social being is negotiated structurally even if individual bodies interact locally. Agency may be possible in the complex relations local contexts provide, but how we em-body identity is never only local; it is also always already a fact of social being. This connection between material relations and identity formation highlights two potential challenges to presumptions of agency in composition theory: (1) the effect of the institution’s role in the social real on how students constitute identity, and (2) the effect of social relations in the material world on how one perceives the potential agency of cultural difference. EM-BODYING IDENTITY AND QUESTIONS OF AGENCY IN THE SOCIAL REAL

In complicating identity through redefining culture as an ongoing process, discourse as multiple, and the subject as fluid, composition has admittedly attempted to exceed its own social location and productively intervene into identity politics. Further, I am convinced that at times identities function in precisely the ways we have theorized, as researchers like Hesford and Brodkey demonstrate brilliantly. I am convinced, that is, that writers do “struggle with inherited social narratives of self ” and students do “negotiate their identities in response to perceived power relations” such that sites of resistance can be created out of even potentially oppressive discourses and students can redefine their identities in acts of self-agency and use such agency to affect material conditions (Hesford xxxiii). If difference always operates alongside sameness, however, I think we also have to ask whether the influence of “sameness” in institutional rhetorics might have an equivalent influence over identity formation and agency. There is a limit, of course, to how much of this complex relation among the material and discursive elements of culture we might take on as part of

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composition pedagogy. What I argue in the rest of this text, however, is that the central issue with which we concern ourselves is quite appropriately the agency of our students. Yet before we can productively support such agency, we need to examine more closely how identity is constituted within academic discourse. Discursive understandings of agency need to be tempered by the way the structural and postmodern interact in material relations. Given the social status of academic discourse and its links to other institutions of power, we must ask what effect forging identities in academic discourse has on how students come to understand, and choose among, the various identities culture makes available to them. Only through a clearer understanding of how students negotiate the construction of identity—within social relations, as bodies in material interactions, and as desiring beings—as part of their instruction in academic discourse might we, then, take on questions of agency more directly.

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interchapter one : Home Places

A colleague, hearing about the book I was planning to write, stopped me in the hallway to ask whether I was worried about writing a book on identity politics as a white woman. My response of “not really” took her by surprise. In today’s academic and public environment, I’m sure, she saw me as being extremely insensitive to the politics of my own body and privilege. Yet I write this text precisely as a way to interrogate her question and the politics that led to it—the easy equation of body, culture, and material privilege. I had, she warned, to be very careful about how I positioned myself. So I start my personal story here, but not with any intention of being careful. Instead, I want to begin here with a short story about myself as a member of American culture and, thus, always inevitably immersed in identity politics. The premise behind my colleague’s question, of course, is that as a white chick, I either was absented from debates on identity politics and/or had no experiential base on which to speak of them. I’m not sure that’s entirely possible as an American in the twenty-first century if we imagine race as a performative cultural act rather than an authentic category of being or biology. On the other hand, it’s impossible for me not to be “white” and coded by whiteness given the way my body moves in the world of late capitalist, racist American culture—no one’s body in this culture escapes whiteness. American culture is never monocultural, yet it is permeated with power relations that consistently privilege parts of my body—its whiteness, my heterosexuality—and disparages others—my gender, my class (but not my class mobility). My body aside for the moment— although its materiality marked by breasts, freckles, pink skin, and excess body fat can never truly be left behind—what might be said to be “my” culture? I doubt I can answer that fully, but I can say it’s peopled by bodies, voices, and experiences that are not as easily encoded as my body. My home place was never coded so simply. It is populated with various images. My first friend ever at the age of three, Eartha Pike, and the musical accents of her Jamaican mother as she cooked us lunch. My gaggle of girlfriends, all of the MacDonald family next door, good Scots, and the raging of their father, angry, as so many of the neighborhood men were, at the conditions of the working class. The competition over who had to get government food and who did not (we didn’t, the

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MacDonald’s did). The constant noise of living, music, marital fighting, fire engines, and traffic that floated into our windows on any given day or night. My first major, drop-dead, can’t-think-of-anything-else crush on Danny Martinez, the Puerto Rican boy who lived two three-deckers down the street. My ensuing crush on Jimmy LaPlante, the Inuit boy who lived upstairs from Danny. Later, in junior high, walking arm in arm with Bob White, an African American schoolmate, and Rich Mendoza, another boy from the island, down a major street just to piss off the people passing by (we were getting smarter about identity politics by then). My bestest, bestest friend, Bridget O’Connor, the daughter of an Irish cop, from whom I was never apart for our entire grammar school years. The raging racism of so many in the neighborhood, who were convinced people of color were stealing their jobs, contrasted with the close friendships most of them had with people of color. My first love, in high school, Larry Jelsine (previously Gelsimino, changed at Ellis Island when his grandfather came over), whose police record and Harley made my father forbid me to see him (after which we, of course, snuck around until he dropped me a week later—romances are short at sixteen). My mother’s admonitions to marry a French Catholic boy like she did and her mother before her. The priest constantly reminding us that premarital sex was a sin, but abortion was worse and birth control forbidden by the church. The vacant look in my uncle’s eyes when he returned from his job digging graves; the sweat on my mother’s body during the summer months as she left the inferno of the hospital kitchen where she worked, which, of course, lacked air-conditioning. The French spoken at every holiday celebration as my older relatives talked of “adult” topics so that us “American” kids wouldn’t understand. The teacher who told me “clepe” (a Quebecois version of crepe) was not a homonym for drape, nor even a word. These are the voices and the people I remember, all equally permeated by the media images of the Brady Bunch and Partridge Family that the whole neighborhood ran into their houses to watch on Friday evenings. My home place, populated as it was with diverse and contradictory voices, experiences, and bodies, did not produce a happy, “living in the salad bowl” narrative of American culture. Neither for myself nor my friends. Larry Jelsine fell off a roof while working for a contractor when I was in my twenties and is now a quadriplegic. Bridget O’Connor died last year. My most recent news of Bob was that he was in prison. Danny Martinez moved, although my cousin, Gina Lianetti, married his cousin, George Lopez, ten years ago. (They now live in a single home with my aunt, uncle, another married sister, and all their children.) My best friend in high school, Larry’s sister, came out as a lesbian fifteen years ago and lost most of her friends from the neighborhood as a result. My brother, when he came out, was kicked out of the house and spent two years separated from my parents while I snuck around, once again, to see him. His best friend from fifth grade is now a pimp I hear. All but one of the three MacDonald girls had a baby while in her teens. Most of my friends from

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elementary school dropped out by high school, the girls for babies, the boys for the army or jobs. And me? I sought to escape the material oppression all around me, supported by my parents’ insistence on educational success, and learned to forget all the voices that I once valued so much. I “got out” in the parlance of the neighborhood and followed my parents’ admonitions to do “better than they did”—“work with your brains, Donna, not your brawn,” my father always told me. I went to college and on to teaching. My multiaccented home place was all that I once knew but I learned to forget, learned to disconnect with it, learned a desire to “get out” and run. How, I now wonder, did I come to be so normalized? When did I learn that the languages of my youth should not be voiced? Why has it taken me so long to realize again what was once so natural? Multivoicedness is now a deliberate effort, not a natural reaction to place, time, and context. It’s a surprise when I remember, when I realize the “we” of a given composition article, say, is not me nor was it ever meant to include the me who grew up in the streets of Worcester, Massachusetts, an industrial city once known for manufacturing that, during my formative years, was hit hard by the move to a service economy as factory after factory closed. It has become painful yet necessary, however, to re-member my body on which the traces of Worcester have left an indelible mark. My home place now is decidedly middle-class and white but, as a result of remembering, no less multiaccented as a result. I carry the traces of Worcester with me now. I have a wonderful normative narrative I can pull out when the occasion arises that allows my body and its encoding to seem well integrated—I know how to be white, straight, and middle-class, and frequently am—more and more often as I move up the academic hierarchy. But other voices, other selves, are still available to me and I still perform (am) them. The languages available to me, the rhetoricity through which I am/be, are as much Rich’s, Bob’s, Eartha’s, Bridget’s, the MacDonald’s, Larry’s, my parents’, my brother’s, my Boston students’ as they are my colleagues’ and the Brady Bunch. To be American, even though we rarely see it in white folk (or even in “white trash,” a term from my youth that I’ve decided to embrace), is to be afforded the possibility of being multicultural, or if we happen to occupy a white body, to become Marcia Brady. Whether I will once again become more Marcia and less Eartha is a constant fear I live with, a constant possibility I have to actively work against.

chapter two

Academic Discourse and Subject Production: Toward a Technology of Power

I feel like English isn’t worth my time in some ways, but I know there isn’t a easy way out as long as I live. I would like to know how English and our writing styles came about and how every day in society they change . . . I know these questions are stupid but I can’t help to think about them. —Tim’s literacy autobiography Precisely because identities are constructed within, not outside discourse, we need to understand them as produced in specific historical and institutional sites with specific discursive formations and practices, by specific enunciative strategies. Moreover, they emerge within the play of specific modalities of power, and thus are more the product of the marking of difference and exclusion. —Stuart Hall, “Who Needs Identity?” COMPOSITION, AS A FIELD, has taken seriously the challenges posed by recent theories of discourse and subjectivity. Depending on the pedagogy, we have employed varying theories of the subject to guide our understanding of how identity might explain the writer’s agency. What we still know less about, however, is how our students come to understand their own identities within postmodern culture. Our students, and all citizens for that matter, are offered multiple positions out of which to construct identity, positions created through the conflicts and convergences in public, media, experiential, and institutional discourses. Such choices include academic discourse. Before we can understand how the teaching of writing might support the subject’s agency to transform the social, then, we must first ask what kinds of subject positions academic discourse, itself, offers for identity construction. We must begin, that is, to untangle the complicated relations among academic discourse, subjectivity, and identity that take place within the confluence of discursive and material relations. Only

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when we come to understand both why and how students interact with academic discourse as an act of identity-formation might we get a better sense of how our pedagogies’ presumptions about subjectivity influence our students’ ability to refigure the social scene of identity politics and take the first step to realizing composition’s goals of writing as social action and intervention into self. The initial site of inquiry into such questions must be academic discourse itself. As Stuart Hall points out in the epigraph, identities are forged out of multiple discursive relations within the social real, but they begin in specific discursive relations located in the material specificity of history and institutions. Understanding identity construction, thus, begins with understanding the process by which subject positions are created. If we understand subject positions as “possibilities for self-hood that exist in the socio-cultural context of writing, both the broader context of society at large, and the more specific institutional context of a particular act of writing,” then identity formation begins with the positions a given discourse makes available (Clark and Ivanic 136). Only through an understanding of academic discourse’s subject positions can we move to the more central question of identity construction: identification. In Hall’s terminology, identification reflects not only the process by which we take on subject positions as identities, but also our own role in this process, recognizing that “the subject [also] invests in the position” (“Who” 6). In this way, identity can be imagined as the meeting point of discourse and self wherein the subject makes a choice, influenced by other discourses and social relations, to invest in particular subject positions and take them on as part of identity construction. Hall refers to this process as suture: I use ‘identity’ to refer to the meeting point, the point of suture, between on the one hand the discourses and practices which attempt to ‘interpellate’, speak to us or hail us into place as the social subjects of particular discourses, and on the other hand, the processes which produce subjectivities, which construct us as subjects which can be ‘spoken’. Identities are thus points of temporary attachment to the subject positions which discursive practices construct for us. (“Who,” original emphasis 6)

Before we can look to issues of identity construction, we must first understand the nature of the discourse that “hails us” by offering subject positions with which we might identify. Developing such an understanding involves an intricate series of questions, beginning with the initial process of moving from writing a particular manifestation of language to the creation of subject positions within the discursive realm in which that language functions. What is the relationship between subject positions, constitution in discourse, and the languages we produce? How might our understandings of subjectivity lead to a theory of how identity interacts with learning to write in a particular discourse? Following Hall’s lead, I seek to understand the process by which identities might be constructed in academic dis-

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course by looking at how the discourse, itself, might best be characterized. Through a close reading of the literacy autobiography corpus described in the introduction, this chapter explores a set of related moves that might help us begin to investigate the questions above by determining (1) how students depict academic discourse; (2) what discursive relationships their depictions suggest in terms of the subject formation learned in writing classrooms, and finally, (3) how critical/cultural theory might explain these depictions. Although I take my direction from cultural theory, I begin with the literacy autobiographies’ descriptions of academic discourse for the explanatory power they offer in pointing me toward the discursive theory that might best explain their descriptions. In this way, I seek to have theory, as much as possible, emerge from student experience, rather than presume that my own theoretical investments might best explain what the students offer. This chapter, then, sets the stage for a more thorough discussion of identity in academic discourse, via the students’ voices, by describing how subject positions are created, a necessary precursor to exploring how occupying such positions might affect identity constitution. As such, the chapter focuses on the discursive elements of subjectification to set the foundation for the more central material issue: why students might choose to construct discursive identifications in ways that impact identity through their lived relations in the social real. By beginning with the discursive, however, I do not mean to elide material relations. Examining discourse as the site of subjectification does not absent such subject positions from the more material effects of power. Discursive relations, as Hall suggests, emerge within modalities of power that have significant consequences for how identities are marked in difference and potentially excluded from the processes by which identifications are taken up as part of our action as bodies in the social real. In examining the literacy autobiographies’ depictions of this discourse, then, we also see how the students begin to situate academic discourse within the specificity of power relations that operate in the material world. The (student) writers come to see the realm of academic discourse, that is, in terms of such difference, and to place power within the discursive realm precisely as Hall explains. In its focus on the discursive, then, this chapter also begins to set the scene for a more thorough analysis of the material realms of culture if for no other reason than that the literacy autobiography writers so acutely sense the power of academic discourse to both withhold power from them and restrict alternative literacy practices. In this way, even when focusing on discourse, the interaction of the discursive and material realms of culture on identity construction surfaces precisely because of the materiality of language itself. Academic discourse emerges from its material location in institutions of higher education, yet it is perceived first and foremost as a discursive interaction since a student’s experience of it begins with reading and writing its language. However, that linguistic interaction can never be separated from its institutional location, bringing with it the power

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relations the institution is meant to negotiate and support. Thus, it is the material artifact of academic discourse—its textual practices and products—that presents itself most obviously as inviting subjectification. Writing practice announces itself through the conventions available for its use within particular sites. If the creation of subject positions is inextricably tied to “the conventions for all types of action, of which writing is one,” then through the social action of producing text in particular conventional ways, students are also invited to take on “what is encoded in them”: the “interests, values, beliefs and relations of status and power” embedded in those conventions and their concomitant subject positions (Clark and Ivanic 137). Through its language, as a material element of culture, academic discourse presents particular discursive options for constructing identity within its realm. Although the literacy autobiography writers perceive academic discourse only as learning a particular linguistic act, such education opens up a site of discursive-material interaction that further affects one’s relations to other forms of social being. DIVIDING LINES: STUDENT DEPICTIONS OF ACADEMIC DISCOURSE

The forty-six literacy autobiographies I examined, not surprisingly, offer multiple and contradictory accounts of the students’ encounters with academic and other discourses. In the rhetorical terms of Kenneth Burke, the texts articulate a bifurcated relationship to academic discourse that includes both identification and division. On one hand, in certain contexts or moments in time, the writers do feel as if they can wield the power of academic discourse self-consciously to exercise their intentions. In these depictions, the writers present themselves as agents, as writers whose human agency controls the writing act and the discursive realm in which that textual act participates. If writers are depicted as agents, they are seen as in control of discourse. Humans are seen as the creators of discourse when they perceive themselves in an identified relationship with it. The motives for a linguistic act, and the power of that act, are situated in the human agent (Burke 117, 172). Agency, or the ability of language to exert power (instrumentality), may come partially through the discourse itself; however, agents have the ability to use the agency of discourse self-consciously. In these depictions, the identification between the language the students use and their ability to realize their intentions with it are so strong that the writers become almost consubstantial with the discourse. On the other hand, when the writers encounter a new manifestation of this discourse, or fail to succeed in school reading and writing tasks, their texts depict academic discourse as an entity somehow separate from their use of its language. In this divided relationship—one that distinguishes between academic discourse and the writers—academic discourse is seen as possessing a power or agency of its own, apart from those who use its language. The process of meaning-making and the knowledge writing seeks to

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create are seen as residing in the discourse itself. The agency of writing lies not in the writer as agent but in the agency of discourse. Not surprisingly, it is in the writer’s divided relationship with academic discourse that we get the clearest picture of a discourse seeking to act upon those who would speak its language, “hailing” those who would write “as if ” they controlled the discourse itself to identify with its subject positions. By examining more closely the ways in which the writers characterize academic discourse when they feel divided from it, we begin to see how the discourse possesses a power of its own, a power that exists beyond the writers’ control. Part of this power is its ability to create its own agents, to inscribe the (student) writers as subjects of its power, to interpellate subjects so that they, too, might be “spoken” by the discourse. The (student) writers can use a discourse’s language with power, but that power is granted through the discourse rather than the writer’s agency. Within such a process of subjectification, I believe we can see how, when the texts bespeak an identification with academic discourse, they are merely voicing part of what Althusser calls the ideals already internalized by the “dutiful subject,” one who “believes it is possible to inscribe his own ideas as a free subject in the action of his material practice” (qtd. in Clifford 43). Before taking up the depictions of identification, then, I turn to images of division wherein the discourse most clearly declares itself to its initiates. Through such a discursive picture, I hope we can come to a greater understanding of the processes of subjectification such a discourse might orchestrate and represents as a fait accompli in the more seamless relationship between self and text found in the images of identification. As might be expected, the themes characterizing a divided relationship are more prevalent in the basic writers’ texts than in those of the English graduate students.1 Because of their placement, the basic writers do not yet see themselves as powerful in their use of schooled language in the new context of college. Thus, academic discourse emerges as distanced, exterior, restricting, and inaccessible. On the other hand, the graduate students generally identify with academic discourse and therefore see its language as a part of the linguistic repertoire that allows them to exercise their intentions. The basic writers’ marginal position regarding this “new” discourse makes the already constructed and powerful nature of the discourse more immediate and distinguishable, even though most of these writers would undoubtedly be unable to describe their relationship in this way. In fact, when asked about the metaphors and terminology that imply division, the writers I interviewed usually responded that they “hadn’t meant to write that” (Denzel’s interview). As writers attempting to “master” academic discourse, the basic writers are made more aware of the shifting nature of identification and division. The way in which the depiction of discourse shifts from one of identification to one of division is further supported in the graduate student texts. Although these texts do not display distance with schooled language in general, a

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similar divided relationship appears in their texts when the narratives begin to center on graduate school and the professional language of English studies. While their relationship to academic discourse might predominantly be one of identification, because they can use certain manifestations of it to achieve their intentions, as soon as this ability is taken away upon entry to graduate school, the discourse permutates in unexpected ways. As a result, the graduate students are distanced, feeling as if the familiarity of the discourse has been stripped away in this new context. The graduate students’ experiences remind us that schooled language serves only as a general descriptive term for manifestations of academic discourse that are neither singular nor monolithic. Instead, academic discourse embodies many different levels of authority achieved through its various textual manifestations. Thus, while the graduate students remain identified with certain manifestations of academic discourse, they feel divided from the ones they are encountering for perhaps the first time. The similarities between the way the professional language of English studies is discussed by the graduate students and “college-level” language is presented by the basic writers are striking, yet not surprising given the marginal position of both groups to these manifestations of academic discourse. In both cases, encountering a “new” discourse results in a clearer sense of différance, a sense that might not otherwise have been felt. This relationship of division is precisely what allows the (student) writers to characterize the nature of academic discourse most fully. The nature of academic discourse is characterized as an entity that is (1) separate from human control, (2) able to withhold its agency—the instrumentality of its power—from humans, and (3) capable of restricting other ways of using language. I discuss the specific nature of these characteristics below under the headings of distance, inaccessibility, and restriction respectively.

DISTANCE Many of the images of distance in the basic writers’ texts are embedded, found only in apparently inadvertent references, structural moves at the sentence-level, noticeable absences, or metaphors. More intriguing is the fact that the texts rarely belabor these points; that is, once a brief reference might be made to the distanced relationship of discourse, the texts quickly move on to a positive experience with literacy or an overt statement about why learning schooled language is good and necessary. In fact, even though the themes of distance and exteriority are pervasive throughout the basic writers’ texts, they also write texts that are predominantly glowing accolades to the need for “good writing” and their own success with it in the past. The tension between the need to see oneself as successfully part of a discourse and the perception that this discourse is not one’s own is much more prevalent in the basic writers’ texts than in the graduate students’; the latter only speak of these themes in the localized time period of beginning graduate school. Intriguingly, the basic writers, much more so than

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the graduate students, highlight their positive experiences with literacy. Rarely did an autobiography by a basic writer focus primarily on negative experiences or difficulties (only five texts). The need to present an ethos of a person who has the ability to use language well and succeed in school, however, should not be surprising given that the institutional label of “basic writer” has called that ability into question. Success in this realm becomes defined as the ability to overcome this unexpected obstacle. (The nature of their placement as “obstacle,” or a “shock,” is expressed explicitly in all but six of the texts.) There is a lot at stake in believing in oneself as a writer capable of doing college-level writing— a testament in itself to the power of the discourse for material success. For example, Charlie, a basic writer, writes that he finally realized why his mother and father, “and countless number of teaching aides” had forced him to struggle with “this eccentric language” (i.e., schooled language, my emphasis).2 Yet immediately after conjuring up this image of a distanced, quirky, fairly incomprehensible language with his allusion to “eccentric,” Charlie returns to validating the language of school immediately. His next sentence begins: “I believe that communicating properly is one of the most important concepts we must all learn at an early age.” Yet the distance from an exterior discourse that Charlie’s text tries to submerge—by immediately contradicting its articulation— recurs in other images as well. Significantly, Charlie also alternatively uses the terms “literature” and “English” in his discussion of literacy. “Literature” refers to all reading and writing done in school; “English” refers only to his outside reading and the short horror stories he likes to write for fun. Whether these quick switches from suggestions of division to maxims on the need for identification are results of the context in which the text was written is impossible to discern (i.e., a university class that would obviously value learning this schooled writing). Yet it is more likely, given the nature of his text, that Charlie did not intentionally choose to present schooled language as distant and incomprehensible. His text does not overtly report negative experiences; his narrative primarily focuses only on why schooled literacy can be and is a positive force in his life. As a result, I read his use of the term “eccentric” as an example of a perception about discourse that does not reach a conscious level for the writer. Charlie’s insight into his divided relationship with academic discourse seems inadvertent because this relationship contradicts the control most of the basic writers want to have. Similarly, Tim makes a consistent—and surprising—switch between the terms “British language” and “English language” in his autobiography. The descriptor, British language, is invoked whenever he speaks of schooled language; English language is reserved only for references to home language and, like Charlie, nonassigned reading and writing. In Tim’s text, we see more clearly than in any other the separation being made by many of these writers between characterizations of schooled language as “distanced” (i.e., a divided relationship) and more personal language (i.e., an identified relationship). The other texts do not

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explicitly use nationalist terms to invoke the foreign, distanced nature of school discourse, yet these images are evoked just the same. Bruce’s text, for example, presents a more implicit, visual image of distance. He writes that “Mrs. Parks showed patients with my reading and . . . writing.”3 The ellipsis serves to separate Bruce, indicated by the possessive pronoun “my,” from schooled writing. This is the only instance of an ellipsis in Bruce’s entire text; its use is such a striking departure from Bruce’s usual style that his teacher comments on it in every draft. Despite these comments, Bruce retains the ellipsis in his final graded version, implying that whatever he felt was being communicated by this structure was too important to cut from his text. While Bruce presents an image of distance related only to schooled writing, Aretha focuses on speech. In a discussion of how she tried to correct her dialect and “talk straight and correctly” in school, Aretha includes several examples of what she means by dialect. Although she discusses other aspects of dialect (e.g., double negatives), the only concrete examples that she chooses to set off by quotes involve personal pronouns in which she is implicated. When she writes of her eighth grade English teacher discussing people “with a terrible use of language,” she explains that “he would mainly be talking about how people would say ‘you be, I be’.” A few lines earlier in the text Aretha ties her own speech with her teacher’s description of the way “people” talk. In contrast, when she discusses her boyfriend’s use of dialect her example is “we is, they is.” Significantly, in these examples she sets up a consistent distinction between two groups, one personal and one removed. By using plural pronouns in her boyfriend’s example, she aligns herself (“we”) with him and his language rather than her teacher’s. Her teacher’s example implies blame and separation (I, the teacher, be; you, the student, be) while her boyfriend’s quote includes her and only excludes “they.” In these apparently innocent examples of speech patterns, Aretha’s autobiography implies her distance from the language of the teacher. Yet, like Charlie, her discussion is located within the larger context of learning to “talk straight.” Even as the writers present themselves as people who are a successful part of academic discourse, or are attempting to become a part of it (“talking straight”), they simultaneously comment on how this language (or alternately, knowledge) can also be more than distant. In a second theme related to division, the writers present academic discourse as something almost tangible that comes from outside of them. Frequently, metaphors of “tools” and “gifts” are invoked. Todd writes that he received his “literacy tools from other people,” while Dan mentions that he does not yet have enough language “tools” and needs to “collect more.” Diane has also taken language from others in that she “acquired” her “English skills” from her teachers. All of these references conjure up images in which the writers themselves have the power to take language, as a physical, definable entity, from others, whose province it is presumably to guard and distribute it. But just as frequently the writers refer to an entity beyond human control that is given only to the privileged. Swati speaks of schooled language

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as confusing; she couldn’t “find the answers,” as if the answers existed in a space separate from her, a space she couldn’t access. Both Latisha and Tim speak of facility with schooled language as a “gift from God.” It could easily be argued that these writers are merely invoking cultural commonplaces for describing literacy: tools, innate ability (i.e., God-given), the search for answers. This is undoubtedly true, yet I find their invocation, as well as the colloquialisms themselves, significant in defining the perceived nature of academic discourse for these writers: Its language is not theirs but something that they must take, earn, or find because, and here’s the crux, it is somehow being held away or hidden from them. Only Diane writes of “acquiring” the tools from her teachers instead of taking or searching on her own, and even in this construction, the verb “acquire” places the responsibility for receiving such tools on the teacher-subject. The nature of schooled language as something outside of the writers that they must find is tied to either human agents (i.e., teachers and “other people”) or language itself. While the basic writers connect their images of distance and exteriority to schooled language in general (or occasionally to specific teachers), the graduate students discuss these discursive characteristics only in terms of “graduate school language”—both the writing and speaking of it. Although not all the graduate students overtly express the entrance to graduate school as representing a marked difference in their relationship to discourse, over half of them comment on a new feeling of distance from the literate practices required in graduate school. In these discussions, all the issues expressed in the basic writers’ texts come together in a single locus. However, there is a fairly marked difference in the ways the graduate students characterize the nature of “grad school” language. The graduate students primarily focus on issues of structure and jargon rather than ideas and knowledge. Even though they perceive that this new manifestation of academic discourse is separate and foreign, resulting in feelings of severe discomfort, they rarely tie this perception to an indictment of the quality of their ideas; instead, they focus upon a skills-related image of writing and reading that appears nowhere else in their texts. Their past successful experience with reading and writing seems to allow them to deflect their discomfort with this discourse from impinging on their ability to think in complex ways; it is only the expression, or writing and speaking, of these ideas that is called into question. This separation is intriguing in itself given that, as teachers of writing (all the graduate students are also composition TAs), these writers would likely label such a division false. It almost seems to serve, instead, as a defense mechanism, allowing them to deflect the feelings of inadequacy such a division from academic discourse has brought about. The most pervasive image evoked in these discussions of graduate school writing is one of disempowerment; any previous perceptions of using schooled writing in purposeful ways has been taken away from these writers. Tricia writes in a note to her professor that one of her peer responders commented that the “central thread” in her text is that “reading and writing have been

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altogether very empowering experiences for me. I agree, at least until graduate school. I’m not sure it’s that simple anymore.” Here, Tricia implies that reading and writing in graduate school has moved into another space for her, a space in which she no longer retains the power she previously felt over schooled language. Patty similarly suggests that graduate school discourse is something different for her when she comments that she really only learned to write in graduate school, an assertion that is undercut by the report of exclusively successful experiences with writing in her primary, secondary, and undergraduate classes. Other writers, however, are less covert about the effects of encountering a new way to write and express their ideas. Sarah writes that her first graduate course “was an unnerving experience. . . . After [this course] I tried to avoid writing courses because I was afraid my writing skills were not adequate for the graduate level.” Janet’s text employs even more vehement terminology about the effects of this new language: “My safe, happy, unassuming attitude toward myself and my abilities as a reader and writer of texts was shattered when I started graduate school.” For Vicki, a recovering alcoholic, graduate school language (i.e., literary criticism) was a source of pain: “I did the best I could, but writing anything academic was still painful for me, because when I wrote, my body cried out for a drink and a cigarette.” In all these examples, the sense that schooled language is theirs to use in purposeful ways to express their ideas has been stripped away. The nature of this language has turned a previously “natural” discourse into something other, something distant that is frightening and disturbing. In sum, the images in both the graduate students’ and basic writers’ autobiographies speak to how writers can exist in a divided relationship with the language they seek to use, and thus to the discourse that embodies that language. Not surprisingly, a relationship of division between the (student) writers and academic discourse emerges in all these texts when the writers are attempting to master a new manifestation of the discourse, whether it be “college” writing or the professional language of English studies. More surprising, however, is the way in which the writers in their current marginal positions, particularly the basic writers, reflect back to a similar divided relationship in the past, implying that such feelings are not new but rather were forgotten when they again achieved identification with the discourse. Perceiving academic discourse as an entity separate from themselves leads the students to characterize the power of this discourse much differently than when they felt identified with it. Rather than discerning academic discourse as their own to exercise their intentions—something over which they have control— the discourse is now presented as having power over them. Part of this power includes the ability of the discourse itself to withhold its language from them.

INACCESSIBILITY One of the ways the writers imply that academic discourse possesses its own agency is through their assumption that the discourse can restrict their access to

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this agency. The texts demonstrate the unattainability of academic discourse primarily through their confusion and frustrations with it; its language seems so distant and perplexing that the writers feel they will never become a part of this discourse. For example, LaVonne, an African American woman who has been consistently corrected for using dialect in school, remarks that “I try to speak in quote, unquote ‘proper English’ which in itself is ironic because I’m not even sure what ‘proper English’ is.” The way she links schooled language to textuality and distances herself from it in her emphasis on the “quoted” nature of “proper” English is remarkable, given that she is referring to her speaking rather than writing or reading. By placing schooled language within a textual realm, LaVonne implies that the language of school is somehow spoken writing and therefore divided from her “natural” way of speaking. Further, by admitting that she isn’t “even sure what [it] is,” LaVonne indicates how inaccessible it appears to her. Dominic more explicitly links his confusion to the textual nature of academic language when he complains that works of literature appear to him only as “a clutter of words.” He later wonders if literary texts would make more sense read backwards. Dan feels this inaccessibility so strongly that his text conflates literacy with a battle whose outcome is practically predetermined: He portrays Michael Jordan as a “language boss” because he “fights against the odds.” Latisha implies that even hard work does not seem to matter in overcoming such odds. She wonders why everyone always says that “practice makes perfect” because this adage does not seem to apply to her language education: “I’ve been practicing for eight consecutive years and nothing has changed.” She comments that consistent practice with sports has always worked for her and asks “what is the difference” with language. Seen in the context of the other writers’ remarks, the difference seems to be the way in which academic discourse exists in an exterior space, a space that somehow gives it the ability to withhold its language from them. Even though the unattainable nature of academic discourse results in frustration and confusion for these writers, most of the texts do not link the withholding of this discursive power to their teachers, or any human agent; instead, it is the discourse itself that restricts their access. Cassandra’s text demonstrates the absence of individual humans as controllers of such an unattainable discourse fairly clearly. Cassandra links the discourse she feels she can’t access to a tradition and history that goes beyond her teacher. According to her narrative, she had always been a successful writer until she was moved into an honors class. On the first paper assignment, she worked for hours attempting to interpret a quotation, but failed to come up with a draft for conference day. She describes her walk to the teacher’s desk for her conference as follows: “I walked from my desk to hers as if I was in a tunnel surrounded by Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Richard Wright screaming ‘You don’t have your paper complete. HA! HA! HA!’” Cassandra not only places the agency of the discourse she has failed to write outside of her teacher’s province; she also depicts the historical embodiments of the discourse as antagonistic and mocking, as a heteroglossia

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filled with the disembodied voices of famous men. Further, these historical embodiments are only too happy to withhold their language and the power that comes with it. Cassandra describes herself as being “stuck”: “I was as they say, ‘working with the best’ but, the best had gotten the best of me.” Like Cassandra, LaVonne writes of an “outside” language that is not linked to human agency but has the ability to act upon her. LaVonne’s narrative is characterized by alternatively successful and unsuccessful interactions with schooled language. Her sophomore year in high school marks a turning point in a short period of unsuccessful attempts at school reading. She describes reading Lord of the Flies and Julius Caesar as “two books [that] combined to break through my reading defense shield.” Reading these two texts marked the beginning of a love for literature assigned in English classes with the exception of a “Beowulf sideswipe” in her senior year. In both these sections, LaVonne places the books in the subject position; it is they who “break through” and “sideswipe” her, not the classes or the teachers. Significantly, not only do the books influence her, but they also have a potential destructive power. She obviously felt at one point the need for a “defense shield” against certain texts, and perhaps rightly so, given the “sideswipe” she is later dealt by Beowulf. The graduate students also suggest that academic discourse has the ability to restrict their access to it. While the graduate students are primarily concerned with how attempting to write the professional language of English studies has disturbed their sense of power with language, they also comment on how their divided relationship with the discourse removes it to a space of exteriority that can withhold its power from them. Sheila’s text most clearly states this sense of being outside the discourse due to a hierarchy implicit in its language: I resented this language because it excluded me from participating. In most of my early seminars, my attempts to understand the content of the discussions was distanced by unfamiliar words, names, and jargon I didn’t understand. . . . The hierarchy implicit in this system can be stifling. . . . My ideas seemed naive in the forms in which I expressed them. . . . I still suffer from the insecurity that my ideas are inferior—or rather, that they are inferior because I don’t communicate them in required ways.

Significantly, Sheila does not question the quality of her knowledge or assume that knowledge is exterior as many of the basic writers do, but she does imply that this language exists in order to keep her, and others like her, outside of the hierarchy, to prevent them from accessing the power to express their ideas in a form in which they would be heard. Like Cassandra and LaVonne, she intuits a power structure that seeks to omit her, but unlike the two basic writers, she ties the structure to human agents later in her text: “egotistical professors.” Not all the graduate students place the responsibility for exclusion in the teacher’s lap. In contrast, Janet also feels as if the knowledge she needs to express her ideas “correctly” exists outside of her, but she links this exteriority to a more amor-

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phous location: “I felt sure everyone knew ‘secrets’ that I didn’t know, and I longed to find some big, black book in the library that contained all the answers about how to ‘do’ graduate school.” Although other humans possess the facility with writing that she desires, she does not perceive a human intention in keeping access from her; instead, she invokes an image of the institution—“a big, black book in the library.” In these allusions, we begin to see how the writers unconsciously perceive power existing within academic discourse itself. In one of the most provocative images of this power, Ben does not see the hierarchy embodied in academic discourse as inevitable; instead, he imagines it breaking down in a dream. On a day in an English class in which the topic seemed particularly removed from anything to do with him, Ben begins to daydream about the destruction of the school. In the dream, not only is the school on fire, but the result of the fire is that the ceiling tiles begin to fall down. Despite Ben’s fantasy, however, the power of academic discourse to embody its own agency recurs constantly in the autobiographies. Academic discourse’s ability to exert power without the presence of human agents becomes most clear with the next theme. While the writers occasionally place the power of discourse in the hands of institutional authorities when they discuss its inaccessible nature, they consistently place such power in the discourse itself when they discuss its ability to restrict other ways of interacting with language.

RESTRICTION The texts depict the ability academic discourse has to restrict other ways of using language in all the areas of language use: reading, speaking, and writing. By requiring what the writers intuit as a certain type of reading process, the institution (and therefore its discourse) disallows processes and interpretative strategies that the writers feel are more “natural” to them. Similarly, the requirements for speaking and writing in school are portrayed as impeding the writers’ ability to speak and write in languages that feel somehow closer to their “true” sense of themselves. In sum, academic discourse itself is imbued with the power to determine what may be written and spoken, and how texts may be read. By setting up its own parameters for language use, the discourse can simultaneously restrict other ways of using language that do not fit within these parameters. The results of academic discourse’s restrictive ability are quite serious for the students. Disallowing their “other” reading and writing practices asks the students to restrict the language practices with which they feel most confident, placing the students in not only a position of division with the discourse, but also one of powerlessness. Academic discourse’s ability to restrict other ways of reading is exhibited primarily through descriptions of “home” reading practices that reflect different attitudes toward texts than those presented in school. For Aretha, this restrictive

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ability surfaces not in different ways of reading but in the move from oral to textual authority. Aretha’s text conveys a feeling of distance caused by the language of texts, causing her to find the language evocative of a different meaning than the one she learned at home. This distance comes out most clearly in her characterization of finding the meaning of the King James version of the Bible “confusing.” She loved the Bible stories and prayers her grandmother taught her as a child, but when these stories are moved into the space of print with an antiquated language, the stories and prayers become something different, and more significantly, something she doesn’t like or understand. Her original way of interpreting biblical images is restricted by the textual nature of the Bible, and she must now learn a new interpretative strategy. Although other basic writers express a similar discomfort with the reading strategies of school, most of the texts suggest a different relationship to texts. In their characterizations of home reading and the reading experiences they found pleasurable, a more collaborative and interactive relationship with texts is invoked. Neil, for example, writes about loving the early reading he did with his parents, a type of reading that was always interactive. His parents asked questions, listened to his reading, and all three of them created new endings to stories. Such an interactive model as a preferred mode does not disappear for Neil as he grows older as it does for most children, perhaps as a result of the influence of school. Even in high school, he writes that the only time he could come up with a “good” reading of a poem and enjoy the process was when he and his mother worked on it together, talking out different interpretations. Like Aretha, Neil finds meaning in verbal interactions, but he transfers this way of discovering meaning to texts as well. Similarly, LaVonne depicts her home reading as interactive and describes her two most successful reading experiences as collaborative interpretations of the Bible with her parents and a book starring Oscar the Grouch she read as a child, in which the reader becomes a character in the story. Neither Neil nor LaVonne’s texts mention that this interactive reading model is allowed with school reading. In fact, Neil even juxtaposes the way he generated reports about poetry with his mother to the individual reports expected of him by his teachers, remarking that he never does well on the latter. The limitations put on their interactive reading practices have intriguing consequences for Neil and LaVonne’s subsequent relationships to texts assigned in school, and the ways of reading they construct as a way of dealing with this limitation. Both LaVonne and Neil, as well as many other basic writers, report that their ways of reading in school were primarily characterized by memorization. The nature of memorization portrayed in their descriptions emerges as almost a “cover tactic” and is typically linked to a fear of teachers discovering their subterfuge. If they expected to read aloud on a certain day, they would memorize passages in advance because, as Neil put it, he “can’t read,” an assertion undercut by his descriptions of reading at home. This fear of discovery, however, is very real, and the descriptions of it are almost reminiscent of an

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alcoholic’s fear of someone discovering their drinking. The nature of memorization as “cover” is probably best described in LaVonne’s account of having to read a portion of The Life of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. over the P.A. for Black History month: I had a week to prepare for the big day, so every night after school I would go home and memorize a paragraph. When the day came for me to read, I walked into the P.A. room to get it over with. When my turn came to read, I pulled out the paper for the sake of not being discovered as a fake, and began reciting. When I was finished I was commended by my teachers and classmates about how well I read. If only they knew.

Although it is impossible to discern the direct cause of reading becoming primarily memorization for these writers, such techniques could be connected to the restriction of their interactive reading styles. The individual nature of school reading presents texts as autonomous; what the text says is more important than any interaction people can have with the text. It almost seems as if these writers have taken this presentation of texts to the extreme: If they cannot bring texts into an environment with other people then neither will they interact with texts individually. Instead, such an individualistic model of reading seemingly translates to memorization, a pure repetition of another’s words in which they are only a vehicle. Thus, the schooled reading model not only restricts their “other” reading styles, it also seems to force these readers to take a powerless stance toward texts. Restriction, then, is closely tied to the discourse’s efforts to change the students’ way of reading and/or reasons for reading. The writers feel as if the discourse that has already prevented them from accessing its power is further attempting to change their successful and pleasurable relationships to reading. This is not to say that reading styles or relationships to texts are monolithic, or that two models of reading cannot be used by the same person. In fact, many of the graduate students also comment on reading differently in nonschool contexts but report that they can maintain more than one reading style simultaneously. Yet the graduate students still see this other reading as inappropriate because of its content or context. Reading nonassigned texts invokes feelings of guilt similar to those expressed by the basic writers about their memorizing texts. For example, Mary refers to her outside reading as “illicit” in grade school, but she only saw this reading as unacceptable when she read something not assigned while physically in the classroom. It is not her reading and writing practices that are restricted, only the amount and times she can read. Tricia ties her feelings of “guilt” or “inadequacy” to reading texts deemed “unsophisticated” by school, particularly romance novels. Similarly, Rajiv does not feel restricted in his way of reading in school, but he does feel distanced by assigned texts. As a gay male, Rajiv constantly feels betrayed by characters because their assumptions about sexuality never reflect his own feelings. His frustration surfaces in questions:

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“Why does the princess always have to marry the prince? Why did Emma have to marry Mr. Knightley?” What is most striking about all these descriptions, especially given how prevalent they are in the autobiographies, is that in none of them is the restriction of reading practices, processes, and interpretative strategies linked to human agents. The autobiographies never refer to a particular teacher, or even a single class, that prompted their feelings about these practices being inadequate. Instead, the texts connect the restriction of these more “natural” reading practices and/or choices of material to schooling itself. Academic discourse, not a human agent, is given the agency to restrict other ways of approaching texts, a depiction that continues in the autobiographies’ descriptions of speaking and writing. Although only two of the texts—one by a basic writer and one by a graduate student—designate speaking as their most “natural” expression of self, both these texts indicate that this type of speaking is restricted by school. For Denzel, his “language communicating skills” are the strongest and least affected when he is speaking with his friends, using what he alternately terms “black dialect” and “slang,” which he defines as the language of young, black men based on the terminology of rap musicians. Denzel realizes, however, that such speaking in school is inappropriate; he mentions that this language is usually perceived as being “ununderstandable” by white students and teachers. He further comments that his “language communicating skills” are most inappropriate in schooled writing assignments. For Denzel, this restriction is particularly frustrating because he places his persuasive power in his “language communicating skills.” Denzel is proud of what he terms his “persuasive” ability. He has always been told by his mother and other family members that he is a persuasive person. He provides examples of being able to persuade his mother to allow him to do things she normally would not. As he moves into the present, his persuasive abilities are discussed within the context of women and his ability to persuade women of many things, although he writes that he prefers not to go into detail about what these “things” might be. By restricting these “communicating skills” within a school context, then, Denzel is rendered unpersuasive—powerless— with language in a way he has not been in other contexts. Like Denzel, Mary refers to language that expresses her “true” self as taking place in conversation. In fact, talking, she realized early, was a way of giving a part of herself to others: “I soon realized that if I talked, the other person would talk back. We would learn something about each other. The more I gave of myself through language, the more (at least ideally) I would get back.” It is only through speech that Mary expresses this exchange of selves, a communication that expresses her inner voice. Unfortunately, she comments, such an exchange rarely happens in class discussion; instead, it occurs only in out-of-school contexts. It is important to note that the only examples of restricted ways of speaking are linked to what are normally described as racial or gendered communicative styles. Denzel’s description of his “language communicating skills” parallels de-

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scriptions of African American English, while Mary’s description of the “exchange of selves” through conversation is reminiscent of “women’s ways of using language.” The only overt example of how schooled writing restricts other ways of using language, however, comes from a white male. Tom provides perhaps the clearest image of the ways in which schooled writing attempts to change the writer’s language by restricting other uses. Throughout Tom’s text, he writes of searching for an avenue within language that would express his thoughts. He finds that avenue in unrestrained uses of speech; however, his father—a symbol of power—tries to force a more acceptable schooled language upon him. Tom writes, “I was never afraid to express myself no matter what I was thinking, I would just blurt it out. This made my dad worry because he always put a major emphasis on having to learn to write a coherent paragraph.” Tom becomes increasingly frustrated with his father’s emphasis on this “coherent” logic because he does not believe such a structure would allow him to express himself. Significantly, Tom sees “the paragraph”—the materiality of discourse—not his father’s admonitions, as that which restricts his ability to express himself in other ways. Similarly, he expresses anger at the school for concentrating on reading and writing rather than valuing “thinking.” Schooled reading and writing restrict Tom from expressing what he sees as his true thoughts, not a human agent. TOWARD A THEORY OF THE SUBJECT

What emerges from these depictions of academic discourse is, on one level, not surprising. That academic discourse should appear powerful in its influence over the writers and somewhat inaccessible might easily be explained by the writers’ position as students in writing and/or composition theory classes at the time they produced these autobiographies. What is more intriguing is the way they depict the discourse as an entity in and of itself that is so “different” it needs to be marked by an alternative nomenclature—English versus literature; British versus English; us versus them—and so inaccessible that memorization seems a viable option to enacting its language. Schooled language is clearly neither the language they see as linked to their “natural” way of communicating, nor is it necessarily a language that invites interaction. It is not even the language that others, like their teachers, ultimately control. Instead, it is the language of power and knowledge that resides in institutions rather than people. For the material-discursive connections so central to my analysis here, this institutional link between language and its power is highly provocative. The writers clearly sense the discourse as a separate entity, offering subject positions they do not currently occupy but strongly desire, and thus associate with a discourse that has the power to restrict their access to it. Yet it is this very exteriority that gives the discourse the power to withhold its knowledge and power from their attempts to produce its language. The discourse’s inaccessibility, however, is not portrayed within the conventional understanding of power

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as wielded by people in positions of authority. Instead, power lies in the discourse itself invoked through schooling as a structural element of experience. In this way, the students’ depictions of academic discourse offer a material element to the discursive: the academic institution. They further imply that it is this institution that organizes the effects of power they feel so strongly, not only denying their access to its language but also restricting alternative literacies from its contexts. In sum, the literacy autobiographies implicate discourse in material power relations as part of the way they are “hailed” to occupy the subject positions its language makes available, linking the execution of this power to the discourse’s institutional embodiment. Theorizing inductively from the literacy autobiographies, I offer Foucault’s theory of discourse as a way of understanding both these points: a discursive agency that lies within an institution, and an influence on subject production with significant power implications. With its explanations of the links among institutions, discourse, power, knowledge, and subjectification as part of a material practice in the social real, Foucault’s theory provides an ideal starting point for better understanding the possible effects of academic discourse’s subject production on identity, at least within the specificity of this one particular discourse as part of a larger discursive formation. In what follows I apply this theory of discourse to the key questions raised by the literacy autobiographies: Why is agency placed in discourse rather than human agents as authorities of a given discourse, and how might such a theory explain subject production in the autobiographies’ images of identification with the discourse? Most significantly, the understanding Foucault offers to the central role played by the institution in such subject production helps explain not only why the students characterize power as an effect of the institution rather than its subjects, but also the construction of the desire for its subject positions that leads to identity formation, a topic to which I turn in the following chapter. In many ways, the theory of discourse offered seemingly treads old ground: that discourse offers subject positions for students to occupy is readily accepted in composition theory. What Foucault offers, however, is new insight into the key role the institution plays in how discursive relations are ordered in the social real, a central premise to understanding the more material effects of discourse on identity construction. THE AGENCY OF DISCOURSE

While Foucault has had much influence in composition studies, we most often take up questions of power via the panopticon and other specifics of his work. A project that seeks to understand the process of subject formation, however, must begin earlier, with his concepts of discourse itself and the complex interactions it describes among language, discourse, power, institutions, and the material realms of culture. Thus, I turn briefly from the literacy autobiographies to a more detailed reading of Foucault to both provide explanatory power for the

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literacy autobiographies’ depictions of academic discourse and set up terminology central to exploring identity formation in the ensuing chapters. Foucault’s key term for discourse—discursive formation (a revision of his earlier reliance on episteme)—recognizes discourse as the site of multiple and indefinite power relations that only materialize within particular historical circumstances that are ever-changing. As such, discourse itself is ahistorical; it has no beginning or end, no formal unity (Archaeology 117). It is only in discursive formations—linked to historical moments—through which discourse manifests itself in particular relations. Other possibilities exist, but are ontologically absent as in Derrida’s concept of arche-writing (i.e., always in a state of becoming, an absence that is necessary for presence to exist). Discourse itself, as Manfred Frank points out, is not “ordered per se” (original emphasis). Instead, “the order of discourse [in] its being-status is purely virtual, whilst its reality involves the permanent change and re-creation of discursively constituted meaning (yet not in a way which can be tied down to any will to power)” (114). Thus, discursive formations cannot be tied to any human will that constructs it. Discursive formations are found neither in the thoughts of men and women nor in institutions; they reside in discourse itself (Archaeology 100). Discursive formations, then, are the key to understanding how a particular discourse embodies its own agency and produces its own agents. The primary characteristic of discursive formations is their ability to produce and define what will be counted as knowledge. It is by controlling the production of knowledge that discursive formations order the “indefinite and multiple” power relationships within discourse. Such an ordering allows them to exercise this power strategically. In fact, it is only by this production of knowledge that discursive formations can be distinguished. “Whenever one can describe a system of dispersion,” Foucault tells us, “we have a discursive formation” (Archaeology 37). Such a system of dispersion is defined by a regularity among the ostensibly disparate knowledge, types of statements that make authoritative claims to knowledge, the concepts produced by that knowledge, and the theories (or statements) grounding these claims to knowledge. In contradiction to the constructivist premise that knowledge is produced by a specific epistemology agreed upon and created by human intervention, Foucault places the production of epistemologies in the discursive formation: “It should be noted that the strategies thus described are not rooted, anterior to discourse, in the silent depths of a choice that is both preliminary and fundamental . . . one must not relate the formation of theoretical choices either to a fundamental project or to the secondary play of opinions” (Archaeology, original emphasis 69–70). The way Foucault describes the placement of knowledge and ideology within the formation itself is remarkably similar to how the literacy autobiographies designate knowledge residing in texts, language practices, and knowledge production that are not only inscrutable but also unrelated to the authorities of the discourse in the bodies of teachers. Seemingly intuiting the discourse as a force

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beyond even the authorities’ control, the students place the power of discourse in history (Cassandra), in textuality itself (LaVonne), or in that “big, black book in the library” (Janet). The discourse further withholds the power it might confer, a sentiment captured most clearly by Sheila: “I resented this language because it excluded me from participating.” Discourse’s exclusionary nature, encapsulated so well here, is further linked to power as we saw in the image of a book “sideswiping” a writer (Cassandra) or the frustration at the vigilant safeguarding of that power, emerging provocatively in Ben’s dream of a burning institution. Not incidentally, this connection between power, control, and knowledge residing in a discourse is one that Foucault also elucidates, arguing that knowledge production is inextricably linked to the way discursive formations exercise power. In his discussion of Foucault, Deleuze explains this inseparable relationship: “. . . knowledge (connaissance) never refers back to a subject who is free in relation to a diagram of power; but neither is the latter [power] ever free in relation to the forces of knowledge (savoirs) which actualize it” (75). In other words, knowledge is produced through power relationships, and power is actualized through knowledge. This insight highlights Foucault’s significant contribution to my inquiry of the materialist elements of discursive subjectification: discourse’s implication in power relations that are experienced nondiscursively in the social real. Through denying access to certain forms of knowledge, valued for their cultural currency in more material interactions, discourse orchestrates power relationships both by interpellating consciousness, as we usually imagine the processes of subjectification, and through cultural relations in its more material manifestations in linguistic practice and institutional arrangements. Although power is never predictable in its outcomes or effects, it is regulated in power/knowledge relations. As François Chatelet explains, we might best imagine “power as exercise, knowledge as regulation” (qtd. in Deleuze 74). Knowledge, further, becomes regulated through institutional structures that invite subjectification and ensure the exercise of power within particular cultures. As such, part of the material realization of such power comes with the relationship among discourse, language, and institutions. Institutions function within formations as regulators of knowledge production and as the linkage to other formations and impositions of power. Like the rules for knowledge production, institutions are manifestations of a discursive formation that help to organize the way power is exerted. The great fantasy of institutions, Foucault asserts, “is the idea of a social body constituted by the universality of wills. Now the phenomenon of the social body is the effect not of a consensus but of the materiality of power operating on the very bodies of individuals” (“Body/Power” 55). In particular, institutions ensure a particular formation’s ability to exercise its power through their connection to the State. Institutions, then, serve to organize the power relations of multiple discourses within a discursive formation. As Deleuze explains: If . . . we try to define the most general character of the institution, whether or not this is a State, it seems to consist of organizing the relations which

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are supposed to exist between power and government, and which are molecular, or ‘microphysical’ relationships, around a molar agency: ‘the’ Sovereign or ‘the’ Law, in the case of the State; the Father in the case of the family; Money, Gold or the Dollar in the case of the market; God in the case of religion; Sex in the case of the sexual institution. (76)

Or, knowledge in the case of the academic institution. The academic institution, in short, becomes yet another instrument of academic discourse’s agency. It regulates access to its knowledge and organizes its relationship to the State and other discourses of power, something the literacy autobiographies seem to understand quite well when they place the agency of language in the institution rather than human agents. The “molecular” relations of learning to write specific kinds of texts, that is, are perceived through the “molar” relations by which power is invested in institutions. Institutions announce their power within the social real; microphysical relations of discourse do not. By connecting learning to write to institutional power, the students intuit a power relation between the material artifact of academic discourse (schooled language) and its molar agency, even as they occlude the discursive from their descriptions, presuming that writing is an intentional act of self. Inextricable from its institutional embodiment, academic discourse organizes power relationships with significant material effects that exceed the seemingly multiple options for constructing identity available in culture. In this way, discursive formations, through their regulatory functions organized in institutions, order the force present in discourse in such a way that it can act upon humans through social practices like writing. The ability to be affected by power is simply a “matter of force, and the power to affect is like a function of force” (Deleuze, original emphasis, 71–72). The force itself exists as a “pure function” that is directed to specific ends through discursive formations. Further, discursive formations exert this power by functioning as “brutal restrictions and systems of exclusion, which owe their unity to the ties of their ‘disseminality’” (Frank 114). Such systems of exclusion, as part of the technology by which a discourse exercises its power and exclusive right to “name” that which can be known appears in the literacy autobiographies most clearly in images of restriction: the exclusion of alternative reading strategies (Neil and LaVonne), “illicit” texts (Mary), alternative languages (Denzel), or alternative functions for communication (Mary and Tom). In a microphysical execution of molar agency, this restriction from knowledge and power is conducted through the material artifact of language. Language’s material function is something the graduate students, in their attempts to separate their knowledge from the “unnerving” experience of writing “graduate language” (Sarah) point to most strongly, although the basic writers’ invocations of “grammar” and “systems” indicate a similar sense of language as the culprit responsible for their struggles. In a Foucauldian world, the way in which power is exerted on humans is caught up in the formation’s ability to restrict and exclude an individual from access to knowledge and authority, precisely the connection the students make

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in the literacy autobiographies. It is through these power relations, and their links to knowledge production and institutional validation, that discourses come to “hail us,” in Hall’s terms, to construct identifications with particular subject positions rather than others. If subjectivity is constituted by discourse, then it is the play of discursive strands that constitutes the grounds within which we can be thought to speak (or write) authoritatively on a subject, that we can be said to “know.” Once we are qualified to “know,” we can become, like the “egotistical professors” blamed for restricting access to schooled language, an authority with the discourse and over those who have not yet gained such a status. The agents of the institution who occasionally get “blamed” in the autobiographies are granted such agency via the discourse. Their own subjectification within it, then, qualifies them to “control” certain manifestations of the discourse’s knowledge and language. Facility with writing a discourse’s language, in this way, indicates knowledge, and through knowledge, power. Not possessing such facility, the students continually remind us, is to be powerless within the discourse, and, instead, be one of the “objects” over which its power can be executed. Since the formation embodies the production and routes to knowledge, it also prescribes the “rules” for speaking about that knowledge, a knowledge we cannot access without being able to speak the discourse’s language. Thus, language serves as the initiator of subjectification, the proof of a subject’s authority, and the means by which other subjects are excluded from the power-knowledge relations in which it is invested. The writing space, in sum, is the space of social interaction with the discourse by which power relations can be organized, subjects produced, and the perpetuation of power relations ensured. Foucault labels the spaces created by a formation in which humans are allowed to speak “enunciative modalities.” The key term here is modality, or method and form. The speaking subject, certainly, operates and produces purposeful language within a discursive formation, but the language, or statements issued by the subject, are not caused by the intention of the author or speaker. Instead, the constant series of operations of a discursive formation are manifested on the surface of discourse, creating a “vacant place that may be filled by different individuals.” This space can be seen as “a dimension that characterizes a whole formulation qua statement” (Archaeology, original emphasis, 95). In other words, a formation orders discourse in particular moments (or rhetorical situations) in ways that embody the production of knowledge by producing strategies (theories) and concepts (ideas) that need human subjects to articulate them. The formation provides, and indeed circumscribes, positions through which humans can speak its knowledge. The ability to speak on a topic, then, does not reveal a transcendental subject or a psychological subjectivity; rather, a discursive formation is, Foucault explains, “an anonymous field whose configuration defines the possible position of speaking subjects” (History 122). It is the conditions of enunciative modalities as they are influenced by history, culture, and context that Foucault terms discursive practice (Archaeology 117). While the

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students’ depictions reside on this level of discursive practice—a focus on material manifestations of language—their depictions suggest such Foucauldian links among texts (discursive practice), enunciative modalities, knowledge and, thus, the discourse of which these form a part. The power these connections provide the discourse is even more clearly acknowledged by the students, particularly in their frustrations at being able to access it. If we acknowledge that such knowledge, power, institutions, and language practice are inextricably linked in the ways Foucault describes, placing the agency of such power within the discourse is eerily accurate. BECOMING A SUBJECT: THE INTERIORIZ ATION OF ACADEMIC DISCOURSE

Such an explanation of academic discourse’s function and power, however, is only partial if we focus exclusively on its ability to remain distant and inaccessible from those who would speak its language. As we know, students do not simply reside on the margins of this discourse. They have, after all, been writing and reading in academic contexts for thirteen to eighteen years depending on their stage in schooling, thus the enunciative modalities of academic discourse have not always been restricted from them. They have been, and will continue to be, “speaking subjects” within academic discourse even as they seek out new modalities that they are currently unable to fill. How students fulfill these modalities might best be explained through the literacy autobiographies’ images of identification. In the identified relationship, students acknowledge their ability to access the power of the discourse; in fact, their depictions no longer invoke a discursive agency. Rather, as Foucault might explain, they see themselves as the agents of the discourse since they now fill particular modalities rather than being denied access to them. Although much of the writers’ attention in the literacy autobiographies was preoccupied with images of division, almost all suggest that schooled language can be used intentionally to achieve their purposes and that certain manifestations of this language seem natural—a “true” expression of their “inner selves.” When the writers report how schooled language serves to exercise their intention or express their “true” voice, they indicate an identified relationship with academic discourse. Their use of schooled language becomes inseparable from their own thoughts and actions, implying that they have become almost consubstantial with the discourse that embodies this language, and have, in Hall’s terms, “sutured” themselves to particular enunciative modalities, identifying with the subject positions such modalities create. The belief in the ability to use schooled language in effective, and indeed even powerful, ways is fairly strong with both basic writers and graduate students. For most of the basic writers, however, this purposeful use of schooled language is more commonly expressed as a promise of the future or a fact of

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their pasts rather than a reality in the present, a reflection of their real or perceived marginalized position within the university’s expectations regarding literacy. The basic writers demonstrate their identification with academic discourse almost exclusively through stories of success with its language, manifested by high grades and teacher praise. In particular, the basic writers report many successful experiences with writing in English classes, commenting on the As and Bs they have always received or mentioning in detail a paper a teacher especially liked. By noting the ability to use schooled language to achieve the approval of the school’s authority, the writers point to their identification with academic discourse, an identification that results in being able to use the discourse’s language self-consciously to achieve an end—good grades. When success stories are being retold, there is no mention of difficulty or frustration with schooled language; instead, they are depicted as natural expressions of the writers’ voices. Further, the basic writers’ ability to succeed in school writing tasks is linked directly to themselves as agents who control meaning making. Cassandra’s text clearly illustrates this type of identification. When she relates success stories and reports receiving consistently good grades, Cassandra puts herself in apposition to her facility with schooled language. She refers to herself during successful times in school as “I, Cassandra, the great essay writer,” equating herself with the language she writes. Such an identification provides a striking contrast to the discussions of attempting to facilitate a “problematic” or “troublesome” language that appear in the discursive relationship characterized by division. While indications of identification in the basic writer’s texts emerge consistently in stories of good grades and teacher praise, a large number of them also express this identification by pointing to creative writing assignments. Creative writing in school is designated as a venue for their most “natural” voice. Intriguingly, creative writing is also juxtaposed with other types of school writing, what we might term critical writing, whenever it is mentioned in the texts. While “critical” writing can be used to exercise the writer’s intention only at certain points, “creative” writing is the manifestation of academic discourse with which the basic writers consistently identify. For the majority of the basic writers, creative writing is the only type of writing about which they express enthusiasm and pleasure. Charlie, for example, writes that he loved creative writing because “we were allowed to let our thoughts and feelings run free and write whatever we wanted. That appealed to me greatly because I had a unique imagination.” This unique imagination manifested itself in what Charlie terms “blood and guts” stories as opposed to the “sissy” writing required in noncreative contexts. In Charlie’s description of letting his thoughts “run free” when writing “whatever we wanted,” he implicitly ties this type of writing to an expression of his thoughts, something that drew upon what was inside of him. Similarly, Zeeva loved to “write creatively,” especially the mystery stories she wrote in elementary school. Swati is proud of the “descriptive papers, poems, and essays” she wrote in eighth grade and was disappointed when she was no longer allowed to write in this way

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upon entering high school. Writing, she laments, was no longer “fun.” Tom expresses almost antagonism toward the “other” type of writing required by school; he writes that he loves to make up his own stories and does not want to get them from “someone else.” Aretha loved “creative journal writing” because she could put down her thoughts and feelings as they occurred. Even in her description of what seems a more natural way of writing for her, Aretha feels it necessary to designate this writing as “creative,” acknowledging a distinction between creative and critical writing, a distinction between different enunciative modalities (those with which they have had success and those with which they have not) which is made in most of the texts. Although the basic writers reveal their identification with academic discourse through the attainment of their goals (evaluation) and expressing their “natural selves” (creative writing), they also occasionally mention the power schooled language gives them in other contexts. In these examples, recognized success with schooled language signifies a type of literacy that is acknowledged as powerful in other realms. For instance, Joe links his ability with schooled language to proving to the “rich kids” that he was just as good as they were: “I figured that if I could persuade the rich kids in our school that I was as smart as them, heck, I could persuade anybody into doing anything.” As in many of the images of identification, there is no mention of using a specific type of language to accomplish this persuasion. Instead, the reader only perceives that this persuasion was accomplished through the way others identified Joe with schooled language by connecting Joe’s persuasive abilities with his success in schooled writing assignments narrated earlier. When he explains the consequences of his linguistic acts, Joe takes the nominative position in the sentence. The implied referent of “Joe, the successful user of schooled language” is expressed only with the pronoun “I,” indicating Joe’s identification and consubstantiality with this language, and, by extension, with academic discourse. Examples like Joe’s of using the signifying power of schooled language to affect someone beyond school authorities, however, are rare. Further, even the identification with academic discourse achieved through successful evaluation is transitory in all the basic writing texts. Not surprisingly, the basic writers rarely feel the ability to achieve their purposes with schooled language in their present circumstances. It is highly probable that these writers may feel more powerful with language than is apparent from their texts, yet they do not overtly refer to this power because they lack the ethos to do so in this context—a text written for a class in which they were placed due to what they interpret as their inability to use schooled language effectively. This lack of ethos, however, may be precisely what has affected their identification with academic discourse at this point in their history as writers. In other words, the context in which the autobiographies were written cannot be separated from the institutional authority embodied in the discourse from whose language they now feel divided.

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Like the basic writers, the graduate students rarely make overt reference to exercising power with schooled language in academic contexts. Further, this lack seems to emerge, as with the basic writers, from the graduate students’ institutional positions. The different position of the graduate students, however, yields a much different reading of this absence. Rather than giving the impression that the graduate students do not feel they have control over schooled language because of their new position, this absence implies the strength of their power with it: Such power is so assumed it need not be spoken (written). Power with schooled language is a nonissue except in the case of graduate school, and in this instance, the inability to use this language to serve their intentions comes as a surprise. While the ability to use schooled language for their own intentions is rarely made the topic of overt discussion, this assumption runs as a theme undergirding the texts. Such lack of overt commentary can be interpreted as a tacit recognition that the writers have firmly identified themselves with academic discourse. Nevertheless, in one of only two explicit references to the power schooled language has to effect change, Mary does tie her example to a school context. Mary writes an essay for a math teacher who frequently uses essay writing as punishment to convince her that this practice is unjust because it punishes all for the actions of the few. Mary’s essay gets results—the teacher never used that form of punishment again—because the teacher “acknowledged the sense of my argument,” even though her topic was “not exactly what she had in mind.” Yet even in this school-related example, Mary is not commenting on her power to use academic writing to achieve status or success; instead, she focuses on changing the rules of the school itself. Tellingly, Mary links this example to her subsequent uses of writing to try and effect change in the political realm—letters to members of Congress (the first in junior high) and instructional materials on environmental issues. Her power with language in these contexts reflects the way language recognized as being affiliated with school can wield a certain influence outside of an academic context. Significantly, it is the power of schooled language in realms other than school Mary feels it necessary to comment on. In a similar move, Margaret writes extensively about her belief, frequently tempered by cynicism, in her ability to “change the world” through her writing. The assumption that schooled language is their own to use intentionally is much more hidden in the texts; the graduate students make only passing reference to their ability to use this language in purposeful ways. These references are frequently found only in transitional statements. For example, in the concluding statement to one paragraph, Rich writes: “I now wonder how my love of books ever translated into a desire to create my own voice, to become a writer myself.” His facility with school reading translates to a desire to use language in purposeful ways, yet that desire to be a writer is a presence in the text that goes unwritten; his power to be a purposeful writer is assumed throughout the text. Rich’s presumption of his ability with schooled language functions as the backing for claims and warrants throughout the text, but a backing that is so ac-

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cepted it need not be made explicit. Instead, it appears only in inadvertent references, like the one above, reminding the reader of its presence. Similarly, Janet uses her facility with schooled literacy as a transition from the period of school to that of work: “As I moved from childhood through the educational system and into the working world, I was always fortunate enough to be labeled as literate.” Here, her facility with schooled language signifies accepted literacy in other realms. Janet never comments on where her literate abilities came from or how she realized she had them; rather, literacy and the power that comes with it is presumed. Tricia takes this power so much for granted that she does not even notice it as the central theme of her text; one of her peer respondents has to point it out. The implication here is that the graduate students’ identification with academic discourse is so strong that their facility with its language can go unquestioned. The writers’ assumption that schooled language can express their thoughts and exercise their intentions points to how “natural” schooled language has become for them, how inextricably a part of the writers academic discourse is. This strong identification with academic discourse can be seen clearly in both Sarah’s and John’s inadvertent remarks. Sarah briefly mentions that “in grade school I was the smart one in class. By the time I got to junior high and high school, I became more interested in my social life than really wanting to learn. This was also around the time I stopped reading so much and I just relied on the headway I had gained in grade school to get me through.” Her ability to use the language of school to meet with success in that context does not need to be discussed because it was already a part of her. In an interesting move, John only comments on frustration with schooled language because it was not challenging enough for him. He could easily manipulate school writing and do exceptionally well on standardized tests (he actually looked forward to the Iowa testing in grade school), so much so that he began to do the homework of his brother’s friends two grades ahead of him. Identification comes through most clearly, however, in Patty’s text, which provides the only overt reference to identification in all the graduate student autobiographies. Patty is the only writer who explicitly ties the expression of her own voice to academic writing, perhaps because she has been involved in an academic context as a student, teacher, and administrator for over twenty years. Patty writes that because of this long involvement with school, she believes her writing upon her acceptance into the doctoral program had finally become her own: “The words on every page were now mine.” Out of all the overt and implicit references to identification, Sheila perhaps puts it best when she remarks that her difficulty in graduate school was “really the first time when I’d felt any sort of prolonged inadequacy in my ability to communicate.” The ability to communicate in a school context was taken for granted until this point, although she, unlike the other graduate students, does posit a reason for this assumption. “Perhaps because there were so few struggles,” she writes, “I have little memory of school.” Sheila’s telling comment reveals how

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little we learn about the nature of academic discourse when we examine only the writers’ identification with it. It has become almost too obvious to comment on for the graduate students, and too disputed by their current institutional position for the basic writers. Even in such positions, however, each of the forty-six texts mentions some form of identification, whether it be material success (grades, tests), the influence gained with others (teachers, classmates), culturally lauded labels (“literate,” “smart”), or the power it gained them in other realms. In such images of identification—even when identification operates as an accepted, unspoken premise in the texts—we get a sense of the writers as inextricably part of academic discourse, as subjects who fill at least some enunciative modalities of the discursive formation. The writers, in short, become part of the discourse itself in Foucault’s formulation. When an individual fills the “vacant place” created by the discursive formation, she then becomes what Foucault calls a “speaking subject,” the “speaking I,” or the “knowing subject.” Thus, the speaking subject becomes yet another instrument by which a discursive formation perpetuates its power. Speaking subjects perpetuate the power of discourse by speaking (writing) within the rules it exerts to produce knowledge and, thus, limiting that knowledge to certain enunciative modalities already provided by the discourse, a proliferation of meaning beyond its auspices being that which the discourse would most seek to contain. Once a subject has “filled” an enunciative modality, then, she becomes an instrument of the discourse’s power over others, becomes quite simply an authority within the epistemological realm expressed by that modality. Yet, the literacy autobiography writers, quite understandably, speak not to the power the discourse has gained over them, but instead, place the power they have gained through the discourse. As speaking subjects they are now able to benefit from the institution’s links with other cultural discourses, to engage in the forms of power the discourse has seemingly accorded them as agents. This emerges most clearly in the writers’ references to civic authority, influence with the “rich kids,” and achievement through tests and essay grades. When the writers comment on their identification with academic discourse, it is no coincidence that the importance of this identification lies with the power it grants the writer both within the institution and with the society in which the institution resides. As the writers clearly tell us, there are many advantages to becoming a “speaking subject” of academic discourse. This is why being “divided” from it can be so frustrating and impacts their sense of confidence and power. TEMPORARY ATTACHMENT OR IDENTITY FORMATION?

Writing academic discourse successfully seems to require that writers take on at least some of the subject positions linked to the enunciative modalities we seek to fill to communicate and have our voices heard. The rhetorical identification the students construct with the discourse when speaking its language, that is,

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suggests that some attachment has been made between the self and discourse, but we must ask whether that attachment necessarily comes to constitute the subject. Or might such attachments, as Hall has argued, be imagined as “temporary,” forged in a continual movement of identification and disidentification that need not indelibly influence the student’s identity? In a poststructural formulation, subjectification and identity construction are seen as complements to one another. Foucault only implies the necessity of such internalization in his description of subjectification; however, Deleuze’s reading of his work makes these implications more clear. In his explication, Deleuze describes Foucault’s concern with subjectification as the process by which the exteriority of discourse becomes internalized such that the inside, or consciousness of humans, is only “an operation of the outside,” or the exteriority of discursive formations (Deleuze 97). Deleuze suggests that human identity itself is determined through the interiorization of discourses and the positions they inscribe for speaking subjects. Yet, while such an observation is a readily accepted premise of most postmodern theories, we have learned more recently from cultural studies that such interiorization is not a necessary result of occupying subject positions. Given the panoply of options for constructing identity, identity formation usually operates more fluidly, as we make and remake attachments with given discourses in ways that do not indelibly mark our identity. A key question remains, then: Can students access the power academic discourse provides through its positions as speaking subjects without the discourse becoming an inextricable part of their identity? The literacy autobiographies suggest that they cannot. In the autobiographies’ reflections on past identifications with the discourse, they also comment on the effect such identifications have had on their identity construction. When the literacy autobiographies discuss such past influences, the texts attribute this influence on their sense of self to academic discourse’s power to influence their thinking to such an extent that it becomes their own. For the most part, the students can only discuss academic discourse’s influence on them in terms of past experience. Only when their present realities have changed can they reflect on how they received ideas and ways of using language from their interactions with academic discourse that are no longer desirable. Academic discourse is presented as having the ability to become interior, an inextricable part of the writers that is seemingly difficult, if not impossible, to escape. In particular, the texts comment on how academic discourse has encroached upon and defined their thinking and writing in ways they were unable to prevent. In their depictions, the literacy autobiographies bear witness to interiorization as the inevitable result of subjectification in academic discourse, suggesting that such subjectification, for this particular discourse, may not be as “temporary” as cultural studies might argue The primary way schooled language influences the way these writers think is found, not surprisingly, in reading.4 Reading as a means of constructing a

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worldview and changing thinking is apparent in over half the basic writers’ texts and all of the graduate students’. While most of the writers see this influence as a positive aspect of their discursive interactions, some now wish they could escape it. Even very early reading experiences have the power to become part of the “reality” separate from the text as Mary’s autobiography’s attests. Mary, like all the graduate students except one, read voraciously throughout her life. The appeal of these early readings was the new worlds they presented, yet these worlds did not remain textual. Mary remarks, “as I read these books, even my own surroundings became suffused with the potential for the fantastic.” Especially in a school context, the language and content of these books work their way into the lives and selves of the writers. As Patty puts it, texts, especially the Aenid, are “part of me for life.” Janet begins her essay with the statement that reading and writing “have shaped my identity.” Reading becomes not only an activity and an exercise in escapism, but, as Rich depicts it, “a journey, a following in others’ words,” that, especially in school contexts, leads to different ways of thinking. John portrays his favorite book, Dune, as something he loved not so much for the content but more for “the complexity it brought to my view of the world and people in general.” The examples abound in the texts: books bringing a new perspective, books creating an identity, quotes becoming the manifestos by which people define their lives, and so on. In all these discussions, however, one image remains—that of taking in a text from the outside in such a way that it shapes thinking and perspective so that the writers of these autobiographies become part of the text. The text and the self become conflated in a single space. This image of “taking in” a discourse is nowhere more poignant than in the recurring images of eating: Swati “devours books,” while Margaret’s books are “comfort food” that she also “devoured.” The perspective, knowledge, and changes gained through these books are viewed predominantly as a positive aspect of literacy because these changes bring about power in terms of school and societal respect and acceptance. Owning books becomes one physical symbol of this status. Rajiv wept when his mother gave half his books to charity when he was an early adolescent; Margaret feels her books are “owed to her” because she has read them. Lori perhaps best depicts the cultural power embodied in texts when she calls libraries “the last strongholds of civilization.” Although the influence of schooled reading (most of the comments on “books” are those assigned by school) gains the reader power and status, academic discourse’s power to influence the students in this way is not always depicted positively. A handful of texts lament this power because it has forced them to see the world in ways they no longer find adequate. Not surprisingly, most of the autobiographies expressing this frustration come from graduate students. Perhaps for the first time, their divided relationship with academic discourse has forced them to reflect on the results of their identification with schooled texts that had served them so well in the past. These writers’ current

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circumstances now allow them to perceive not only the influence of schooled reading but also their frustration with worldviews they now find difficult to escape. For example, Kim recounts how her assumption of male privilege continued up until her second stint in graduate school when she was in her midthirties. Although, as an undergraduate, she was the one who desired to be a reader and writer, she explains that during this time she allowed only men to tell her what to read and write. She links this to reading assigned texts that place males in dominant positions. As a result, she sought out only male teachers. Through these experiences with schooled texts and male teachers, she inherited a “flawed sense of my female self ” that further “translated into a flawed perspective of other women.” Latisha implies that she has internalized not only the perspective of texts but also their linguistic structures. As she becomes aware of these structures’ effects, she comes to resent this influence on her speaking. In a seemingly innocuous reference, Latisha reports her frustration at the basal readers she absorbed as a child because she now feels that sentences like “Dick and Jane played” caused her, and her fellow students, to “begin talking like robots.” The frustration of trying to escape the perspectives gained from schooled reading comes out most clearly in Tricia’s text. Like many young women, Tricia spent much of her early years reading romance novels, Nancy Drew mysteries and Cherry Ames chronicles, the latter two being encouraged as “outside” reading in elementary school. Her reply to her own question of “was all this reading beneficial to me?” is telling in that it expresses the tension between the power she gains through reading and a perspective with which she is not entirely happy. “I know I can attribute my strong verbal skills to it,” she writes, “but at the same time I certainly internalized a highly romanticized world view—swallowed it hook, line, and sinker, and went back for more. And as much as I’ve grown since then, vestiges of the romanticism still lurk insidiously somewhere and surprise me.” The “insidious” effect of this immersion in an exterior discourse is what frustrates all these writers. Tricia, like Kim, is most uncomfortable about the fact that she does not know how many of these views she no longer accepts are still lurking around to surface in yet unrealized manifestations.5 Despite its exteriority, academic discourse in all these examples is capable of becoming inextricably a part of the autobiography writers’ perspectives, even to the extent of an influence of which they may not be aware. Although the majority of the examples come from reading, I do not take this as an indication that writing is not similarly involved in these processes. Instead, reading, as a literate act ostensibly focused on the reception of texts, declares itself more obviously as an act of interiorization. Given the ideological belief in their own “voices” and the sanctity of “opinion” in our culture, it is not surprising that we do not find more direct links to textual production (an act they presumably control) as an influence on identity. While not all the writers feel such internalization has had negative results, they all speak to its reality. Perhaps the most intriguing examples of internalizing

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academic discourse, however, don’t come from specific references to reading and writing. Instead, they are invoked through metaphoric images that describe how an exterior discourse can shape, change, and become a part of the writer. For example, Ben describes people as “sponges soaking up the knowledge about the world around us.” School and teaching, particularly English classes, “form” a student “just like . . . a sculpture.” When “we start out in our first years of school, all we are is a ball of clay. . . . Hopefully when we graduate from college we will be an outstanding work of art.” The clay itself has substance but no form. It exists to be molded by an exterior force into a form with cultural capital (art) that did not exist before. Even the notion of a substance that makes up the self apart from discourse begins to fade in Margaret’s startlingly poetic images of the way in which an exterior language acts upon her. Margaret writes that “everything, including my reading and writing, seems to happen to me from somewhere outside. I always picture ‘me’ as a form— bluish with speckles, within a body, not really connected.” Margaret’s text invokes an image of a fluid, almost gaseous, form for the self shaped by discourse, a self that is enclosed only by skin. On the other hand, Rich describes a self tied to a physical body, but it is not this self that interacts with discourse. Instead, the noncorporeal self exists only in relation to outside discourses. “As long as I can remember I’ve strained to hear other people’s voices, to take in words wholesale—and say them back. Other people’s words are like drugs to me, an ecstasy in the old sense of the term, an out-of-body experience” (my emphasis). Seen in the context of the rest of his autobiography, we can discern that Rich’s references to “voices” are those of his teachers’ and assigned texts. Later in the autobiography, Rich describes how he’d rather take on the voices of authoritative texts than use his own: Most significant to me now is the fact that early on I couldn’t make this artificial distinction between other people’s voices and my own: without any sense of wrongdoing I was for years a felonious plagiarist. In fifth grade, I wrote long reports on dinosaurs and on monster movies that I invariably got As on. . . . In writing about Tyrannosaurus Rex, for example, I’d go to one of my several dinosaur books and transcribe sentences piecemeal—not because I couldn’t come up with my own words but simply because I liked the feel of those book words.

Taking on “those book words” encouraged Rich to “forge for myself a like voice.” He reports that now, as a graduate student, “the words I speak come from all these voices, and they are me” (my emphasis). Taking in those voices was once an “out-of-body experience,” but now such an exterior discourse is inseparable from Rich’s definition of himself as a language user. Rich’s text in many ways sums up the effects of academic discourse’s influence that most of the writers only imply. He provides the clearest example of how academic discourse not only influences thinking, but also becomes internal-

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ized in such a way that it is inseparable from those who speak its language. Rich has clearly taken in an exterior discourse and made it his, the necessary result of becoming a speaking subject of the discourse: Its language and its attendant epistemology and ideology have become his own. Becoming a speaking subject, autobiographies like Rich’s suggest, inevitably leads to interiorizing academic discourse in such a way that its perspective becomes the students’ own. While such a merging of discourse and “self ” is referred to only as a fact of the past, or, for some of the writers, a fear in the present, this time line makes perfect sense. Because the writers operated as speaking subjects within academic discourse in the past (i.e., in their identification with it), the discourse was positioned in such a way that interiorization could take place. Given the significant benefits subjectification might bring about, it is no surprise that students might easily become subjects of the discourse. What is more surprising is the lasting effect on identity the autobiographies point to in their pasts, implying that identifications do not always function as “temporary attachments” or as fluidly as many of our theories presume. Of course, identity must function such that not all attachments can be mutable and under constant change—otherwise our presumptions about self would constantly be under scrutiny. Yet, what makes us retain and more firmly identify with some subject positions rather than others? Why does accessing the power of academic discourse also seem to influence identity formation in seemingly permanent ways? It is this move from division to identification that we need to understand more clearly if we are to assess the effect academic discourse has on identity formation and the presumed fluidity of the subject by which we construct our theories of agency.

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interchapter two : Learning My Class

Growing up in the urban center of an industrial city, I can say with certainty being “classed” was not something we thought much about. My family assumed, like so many American families, that we were simply on the lower end of the middle class, that great lump that included for us everyone not on welfare or without a trust fund. As a grammar school student, I was vaguely aware of hierarchies in our neighborhood school. I knew, for example, that I was one of only two in my class who brown-bagged it rather than receiving my meal from the free lunch program. I vaguely remember references to how “proud” my parents were that I chose to befriend other “working” children, especially Bridget, the local cop’s daughter, rather than the welfare families’ kids. In the hierarchy of our neighborhood, I was on “top,” subject to ridicule by the other children only because my brother and I had high grades, or the infrequent jokes by neighbors about my grandmother’s Quebecois accent and befuddlement that we called her “memere.” Given my local context, a neighborhood where factory workers, service workers, and welfare recipients mixed, I had little sense that within larger society my family was marked as somehow different. The few indications of this marking I received came in confusing forms: my father’s constant search for better opportunities, the pediatrician’s confusion when my mother explained that we couldn’t wait past five o’clock for an appointment since we had to catch the bus, my parents’ worry about the vacant factories we had to pass while walking to catechism at the local church, or the “difference” between the bawdy jokes and volatile arguments that characterized our family discourse and the milder conversations of the Brady Bunch. Even while I was ignorant of how class was already marking my consciousness, a few family admonitions about how to act publicly struck me as odd. We were not to discuss money outside the family. If it came up, we should avoid telling teachers whether our parents graduated from high school (they didn’t). Finally, as proud as my parents were of the work they did, it was made clear almost from birth that my brother and I were expected to “do better.” Particularly for my brother, as oldest son, college was not a choice but a presumed reality. It was once I had left the comfortable confines of my neighborhood and ventured to the large urban schools for junior high and high school that my class

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was made obvious to me. Although some hint that I would be marked “different” in these contexts should have come through the fact that none of my grammar school classmates had been tracked into honors with me, I assumed with the arrogance of an eleven-year-old, replete with belief in my own individual autonomy, that my tracking was simply a result of how much “smarter” I was than my classmates. My new classmates’ actions—almost exclusively white, and almost all from middle- to upper-class homes—provided, not surprisingly, the first glimpses that I was somehow Other. Assigned a group geography project in seventh grade, I invited Lucy, one of my group members, home to complete the project. Although I was able to dismiss the growing dismay on her face as we walked from school to my neighborhood as a personality quirk, Lucy’s declarations to the rest of my group members that I lived in a “ghetto” were impossible to ignore. My confusion at her statement is telling: a ghetto, I assumed, was where Jimmy Walker lived on Good Times. Since we didn’t live in a high-rise in Chicago, how could we live in a ghetto? We didn’t, of course, but Lucy had no other way of characterizing a row of three-deckers on a major urban street, a stone’s throw from a cemetery, the public transportation garage, a car wash, and a glass factory. Lucy’s reaction never made me ashamed, as it was obviously intended to, but it did force me to realize what “class” truly meant once I ventured beyond my neighborhood. This dawning awareness of class compelled many of my grammar school classmates to react oppositionally. They opted out of the educational imperative to be successful and defined themselves quickly as “troublemakers with no interest in school.” By eighth grade, they could be clearly distinguished from others as a group called the “Edgies,” a gang name coined from the name of our grammar school. (Not surprisingly, none of the Edgies that I know of graduated from high school.) My reaction, and that of some others like Bridget, was instead to hide our backgrounds from the derisive gaze of school and peers. Never again did I invite a classmate home unless I had been to her house first or had come to trust her. I threw myself into school, maintaining the “honors” status that ensured my teachers did not identify me as an Edgie. When Mr. Rodgers happened to ask one day if anyone in our class was an Edgie, I tentatively raised my hand only to hear his shock and surprise: I didn’t, in his words, look or act like one. I never openly admitted it again. When asked in art class to include on our “index information cards” our fathers’ place of employment, I left it blank, taking the detention that went with my refusal to fill it in when directly asked rather than admit that my father was recently unemployed, the only six-month period in my life when I remember him not working. My entire life my father had worked two or more jobs, working ten to fifteen hour days. When he bought his own business—a bar and deli—the long hours got even longer. I had learned from my father a tenet I still hold dear: The measure of a man is how hard he works. There was no way I was going to expose this hardworking man to the school’s gaze just to satisfy some art teacher’s demands!

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In junior high, I resisted somewhat, despite the new caution I had learned, the incitement to erase in public forums, whenever possible, any marking of class. My friends continued to be “from the neighborhood” or other neighborhoods like it; I followed the fashion trend of army pants and work boots that arose among the Edgies and other working-class kids. By the time I reached high school, most of my token forms of resistance were gone. Having petitioned for special permission for me to attend the “rich” public high school rather than the one I was districted for, my parents assumed they were making a decision with my best future interests in mind. For me, the division between the classes in this new school was even more obvious: A clear line was drawn early on between those of us who lived on the “wrong side of the tracks,” a metaphor only in that tracks were not the separating line, but Park Avenue. Again, tracked into honors classes, I was one of the few students not from the west side of Park Avenue and became more and more determined to demonstrate that I was as “good as” the other honors students. Although I had no conscious awareness of this as a decision at the time, it is obvious in retrospect as I changed my fashion—searching the stores with my mother endlessly for “Izod” clones (tigers instead of alligators) and yoke sweaters made of polyester blends rather than Northern Isle—and my extracurricular activities, joining the Drama Club, the newspaper, and Latin club rather than cheerleading. Between these three clubs, school, and my part-time job (I started working at fourteen), I had less free time than my classmates but I was sure never to mention this fact in those honors classes. The work ethic so ingrained during my early years, I would recognize later, was one of my greatest strengths. Speaking the value of that ethic at this age, however, seemed impossible. At this point in my life, the joy I experienced through work—and the consumptive power it gave me to buy new clothes and save for college—only reminded me that I didn’t think or act like those around me. My only token resistance in high school was in my choice of friends; I held on to those from junior high like lifelines. As resistance goes, however, it was an unconscious move; I simply couldn’t connect with most of my honor student classmates in the same way: another, constant reminder of my “difference.”

chapter three

Turning Ourselves into Subjects: Identification, Power, and Desire

The customary model for understanding this process goes as follows: power imposes itself on us, and weakened by its force, we come to internalize or accept its terms. What such an account fails to note, however, is that the “we” who accept such terms are fundamentally dependent on those terms for “our” existence. —Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power IF WE RETURN TO HALL’S DEFINITION of identity, I have thus far only

sketched a partial picture of discourse’s role in identity construction. Recall that identity, in this formulation, points to both the “discourses and practices which attempt to ‘interpellate’, speak to us or hail us into place as the social subjects of particular discourses” and “the processes which produce subjectivities, which construct us as subjects that can be ‘spoken’” (“Who?” 5–6). In chapter 2 we began to get a partial picture of the discourse’s attempt at interpellation; however, we still know little about the processes by which identification occurs. Only by looking more closely at how we come to “suture” such positions through a deliberate act of identity construction might we understand the role academic discourse plays in constructing identities and, perhaps, influencing the other subject positions our students hold dear. Specifically, we must ask whether identifying with academic discourse necessarily means students have no agency over the influence such positions might have on their constitution of self. After all, it is almost a maxim of poststructuralist and cultural theory that writing contexts are heterogeneous and, as such, offer “a range of possibilities for self-hood” (Clark and Ivanic 138). If writing contexts offer such multiple possibilities, why do the students seemingly choose identifications with academic discourse? The key to this question, I contend, is caught up in how the subject, herself, participates in identifying with the discourse through her interactions as body in the material realms of culture. This question, in short, is inevitably one about

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power. As Romy Clark and Roz Ivanic assert, there may be a range of possibilities available in any writing context, but “there are also patterns of privileging among them” (138). The literacy autobiographies illustrate how such privileging emerges from academic discourse’s connection to other institutions, discourses, and the material reality of economics in their authors’ lived experience of culture. What the literacy autobiographies offer, that is, is a way of understanding the central role the subject, herself, plays in constructing identifications with academic discourse and why she willingly invests in the reformulation of consciousness such identifications orchestrate. Understanding our own role in subjectification, the autobiographies suggest, is inseparable from how the materialdiscursive realms of culture construct desire for academic discourse. We invest, quite simply, because we want to. In this way, desire is the locus around which the relations among the discursive and material realms of culture circulate and, thus, how their effects on identity construction in academic discourse might be clarified. Desire is typically prefigured through psychoanalytic discourses that define it as the perpetual attempt to fill a “lack” that can never be fulfilled, a desire for the wholeness we once felt when we inhabited our mothers’ bodies. Hence, desire is imagined as an ahistorical process of ego formation embedded in libidinal economies. Yet, desire cannot be separated from the material conditions in which it is constructed. Rather, we learn to desire in specific social conditions as a way of ensuring our status as social agents within particular historical realities. As Bradley Macdonald has recently argued, the concept of desire “can no longer be articulated as an abstract process wedded to the unfolding and realization of selfconsciousness; rather, desire must be seen as the socially and historically embedded way in which sensuous beings [i.e., bodies] strive to make their world, aspiring toward plenitude and singularity” (24). Desire is learned both through the body’s experiences in the social real and through the multiple cultural discourses that provide meaning to those material interactions. In explaining why students seek out identifications with academic discourse through the concept of desire constructed in the material-discursive realms of culture, I attempt to highlight the more material elements of the discursive process under examination here. It is only through examining our immersion in the social real—both materially and discursively—that we come to see how discourses “hail us into place as the social subjects of particular discourses” and invite us to take on these positions as part of our identity formation. Students, as citizens of a particular society, already come to us with a thorough understanding of—and abiding belief in—the larger cultural ideologies that give meaning to everyday life, ideologies in which academic discourse, too, is immersed. In the autobiographies, the beliefs in autonomy, success, and the route to material gain as laid out in our culture persuasively incite students to internalize subject positions, ultimately constructing identity in accordance with the discourse. Such subjectification is actively sought out through a desire for the

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agency the discourse provides the subject as a producer of language in control of her cultural interactions, and for schooled literacy’s ability to signify a body appropriately immersed in capitalist economies. Not yet an indictment of agency resting in our multiplicity, such a picture does indicate that power plays a central role in how we constitute that subjectivity, suggesting that academic discourse influences identity construction more significantly than most composition pedagogies usually acknowledge. TECHNOLOGIES OF THE SELF, OR DESPERATELY SEEKING OUR OWN SUBJECTIFICATION

While Foucault concentrated predominantly on technologies of power throughout most of his life, in his later work he became more interested in the role humans play in the power of discourse to act upon them. In The Use of Pleasure, for example, Foucault self-consciously admits to this change in his project, describing his new interest as a genealogy of how the self constitutes itself as subject (11). This new project, and how Foucault connects it to his earlier work on power, can illuminate much about how we not only internalize subject positions but also seek them out and willingly participate in our own subjectification. As Hall explains, “the notion that an effective suturing of the subject to a subject-position requires, not only that the subject is ‘hailed’, but that the subject invests in the position, means that suturing has to be thought of as an articulation, rather than a one-sided process” (“Who,” original emphasis, 6). Acknowledging our role in subjectification—particularly our desire for such subjectification—has significant implications for the potential influence such positions might hold for our own identity construction. In his last seminar before his death, Foucault gives a name to his new project, technologies of the self, the means by which “a human being turns him or herself into a subject” (“The Subject” 208). Acknowledging that his primary motivation has been to describe “the organization of knowledge with respect to both domination and the self,” he now admits, “perhaps I’ve insisted too much on the technology of domination and power” (“Technologies” 18, 19). Despite Foucault’s declaration of a major shift in emphasis, technologies of the self are, not surprisingly, inextricable from technologies of power. He asserts that four technologies exist that rely on each other in order for discursive subjects to be produced: (1) technologies of production, which permit us to produce, transform, or manipulate things; (2) technologies of sign systems, which permit us to use signs, meanings, symbols, or signification; (3) technologies of power, which determine the conduct of individuals and submit them to certain ends or domination, an objectivizing of the subject; (4) technologies of the self, which permit individuals to effect by their own means or with the help of others a certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct, and way of being, so as to transform themselves in

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Each of these technologies, and their multiple interrelations, “implies certain modes of and modification of individuals, not only in the obvious sense of acquiring certain skills but also in the sense of acquiring certain attitudes” (“Technologies” 18). The production of “certain attitudes,” my main concern here, is conducted through the interplay of technologies of power and self, while technologies of production and sign systems—in their connections to the social real—serve as the necessary preconditions through which the former can exert influence. In these connections, the power imbued within a given discourse is connected to the forms of material power it can accord the discourse’s subjects. Recall the literacy autobiographies’ implicit assertions that filling enunciative modalities of academic discourse accorded their authors power civically (labels of “literate”; achieving public voice), institutionally (grades on papers; exams), and socially (influence with the “rich kids”). Because of its material benefits, academic discourse is sought after as a route to power. Its technology of power is supported both by its connections to other discourses and its claim to certain valued ways of knowing in our society. The students, thus, seek out such validation and the benefits it can accord, as we will see, by willingly engaging in “turning themselves into subjects”; in fact, they actively seek out such subjectification. The writers’ own desire “to attain a certain state of happiness” becomes the key mechanism of such a technology of self. Technologies of self, thus, work within a complex interplay of material and discursive cultural relations. The choice of technology as a primary term is essential here. A technology is a process or means by which something—in this case, discursive subjects—is produced, yet the metaphor simultaneously suggests that the power to institute such a technology is inseparable from materiality. Public and institutional rhetorics convince us that pursuing certain subject positions is, indeed, to pursue “happiness.” Such discourses further construct desire through their interrelationships with the material conditions they help create and support. The interactions of discursive reality (our languages for understanding experience) and material experience (our physical and social interactions in everyday life) work to create desire both as a conscious act of mind and a reactive sense of body that receives pleasure through this process of subjectification. Finally, subjectification is orchestrated through the material artifact of language, how it is presumed to signify materially, and in the desire for ontological Being as it is prefigured within our historical moment. In this way, discursive, material, and psychoanalytical processes produce a desire for subjectification within academic discourse, convincing us that our “choices” for identity construction are best orchestrated in favor of such socially specific desires.

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THE WILL TO KNOWLEDGE AND DISCURSIVELY INSCRIBED DESIRE: SEEKING OUT SUBJECT POSITIONS WITHIN INSTITUTIONAL ARRANGEMENTS

How we come to “turn ourselves into subjects” begins with a desire to occupy certain subject positions rather than others. Part of the way this desire is created is through our public and institutional rhetorics where we learn how to privilege in “appropriate” ways. Yet, such rhetorics work not simply as an imposition of ideology that would imprison consciousness; rather, such rhetorics function so well because they present themselves as a conscious choice in favor of liberation rather than subjugation. As Jana Sawicki has noted, Foucault’s entire project could be described as writing histories that show how traditional emancipatory theories have been blind to their own dominating tendencies (97). The traditional liberatory rhetoric surrounding education in the United States almost begs for an analysis that uncovers how academic discourse’s claims to liberation might also produce a desire for precisely the kinds of subjectification the literacy autobiographies demonstrated in the previous chapter. The role desire might play in how one seeks out identification is best illustrated in Foucault’s description of what a shift from archaeology (technologies of power) to genealogies (technologies of self) might lead us to: an analysis of “the practices by which individuals were led to focus their attention on themselves, to decipher, recognize, and acknowledge themselves as subjects of desire, bringing into play between themselves and themselves a certain relationship that allows them to discover, in desire, the truth of their being . . . in short, with this genealogy the idea was to investigate how individuals were led to practice, on themselves and on others, a hermeneutics of desire. . . .” (Use of Pleasure, my emphasis 5). What might be viewed by students as the “discovery of the truth of their being” in academic discourse—a route to their own agency—seems inextricable from the way our culture manufactures a “hermeneutics of desire” in its liberatory rhetoric about schooling. If students want “good paying” jobs, a self-satisfying career, or even to be seen as capable thinkers, they are led to believe that school is the only acceptable route to these ends. They are told this continually by parents, who learn it in turn from their parents, advice on parenting, and the apparent success accorded those educationally successful in the social real. Political commentators, journalists, and politicians take up this unspoken premise constantly in their cries to improve the state of our schools through recent initiatives for statewide school testing, “grading” of schools, vouchers, and the abolishment of bilingual programs. Any given day one can hear a talk radio host, read a news story, or watch CNN and hear testaments to the need for school improvement precisely because not doing so affects the state of our economy and our ability to compete with other countries (recall all the comparisons of U.S. and Japanese school systems in the 1980s). Failing schools further keep the poor from having opportunities

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to move up the ladder of success and ensure continuing inequities for people of color, immigrants, the poor. In short, the failure of schools equates with economic recessions, the problems of our inner cities, the shrinking of the middle class, and the pervasiveness of racism in the public sphere. This belief disperses itself endlessly by a proliferation of signs in media, politics, and education, becoming inextricably linked to lived experience in U.S. culture. Its permeation of multiple cultural spheres accounts, in fact, for its seeming imperviousness to change as seen in how resiliently this myth alters through progressive change after progressive change in education. With such a continual bombardment of messages, it is no surprise that our students, as well, would believe unerringly in the power of schools to ensure economic success. This link between economics, liberation, and schooling is equally embedded in its literate practices. The function of schools to support the myth of class mobility in the United States is continually tied to literacy now and at many points in history. As John Trimbur has argued, literacy crises throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries almost always seem to emerge precisely when concerns about class distinctions, and middle-class anxieties about loss of status, become central. Such anxieties become inseparable from a concern for literacy in progressive movements that “represent schooled literacy as a means of ameliorating class antagonisms, equalizing economic opportunity, and ensuring social cohesion and political integration” (“Literacy” 286). Harvey Graff probably denotes this move most clearly in his elucidation of the literacy myth, the presumption that literacy will automatically grant economic gain and civic participation. In its most current articulation, the literacy myth now becomes aligned with technology in the more recent calls for, and monetary investment in, “technological literacy.” Yet, focusing our attention on technological literacy only reinstantiates the literacy myth even more deeply. Although the specificities of literacy’s liberatory promises to ensure the material success of its subjects might permutate with changes in history, Cynthia Selfe shows how such a myth remains as pervasive as ever at the beginning of the twenty-first century by becoming linked to technology in ways supported by government initiatives, business and corporate grants, and parenting advice in the media. In these connections among schooling, literacy, and economics, we begin to see how discursivity and materiality might interact. While the myth that schooling equals economic success disperses into multiple meanings aligned with some of the worst aspects of our society—jingoistic nationalism, racism, the unequal distribution of wealth—what holds its multiple meanings together is its invocation of the capitalist credo: competition, class mobility, the accumulation of capital, and the need for a continually expanding economy. Such a link with capitalism, in fact, is perhaps what allows the liberatory rhetoric of school to function so well within a technology of power, despite evidence that many of its claims, for the majority of citizens, are false. Although U.S. society might be seen as proliferating an incredible diversity of values, ways of knowing, and

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actions in the world, the key belief that arguably holds us together is a trust in postindustrial capitalism. Regardless of race, creed, ethnicity, class, gender, or political affiliation, faith in capitalist processes (even for those of us who might critique it while comfortably ensconced in our middle-class homes and jobs) has seemingly become the mark of the U.S. citizen. We count on it to solve not only our own social problems but also those of international politics; the spread of capitalism has come to be seen as synonymous with the spread of democracy. The capitalist imperative to produce and consume becomes linked with multiple discourses of democracy, nationalism, citizenship, meritocracy, and economics. Within such a confluence of discourses, schooling remains firmly entrenched as the institution responsible for ensuring the perpetuation of opportunity on which capitalism relies to assure us of our continuing, presumably upward, movement within the hierarchies it imposes. Recognizing the central role capitalism plays in a multiplicity of discourses also allows us to better connect the structural and local conditions in which our students operate. While the local may never result in such predictable outcomes, the structural domination of economic systems plays a crucial role in the social real. Although Foucault allows us to connect power, institutions, and material conditions through his understanding of discourse, he neglects the more structural effects of power on identity. Peter McLaren’s insight into how a more orthodox Marxist understanding might temper the poststructural is instructive here: “While domination has a logic without design [i.e., no overt intentionality or causality] in its sign systems and social practices, it does operate through overdetermined structures” (Predatory 136–37). Not surprisingly, academic discourse becomes embedded in such structural relations through its institutional role in culture. Academic discourse achieves its influence by delimiting the parameters of what can be known, the processes by which knowledge is created, who can speak authoritatively of that knowledge, and in what terms such knowledge can be spoken (written). While any discourse might be distinguishable on these terms, academic discourse’s embodiment in a social institution accords it a cultural value only such a societal status might grant. Its rhetoric of liberation can propagate endlessly precisely because its institutional discourse functions both to support other cultural discourses and to ensure us that it functions according to culture’s dictates. That the academic institution, particularly in recent times, is equally subject to the dictates of capitalism and the imperative to perform its function correctly cannot be ignored. (Witness the arguments for school testing and the need for accountability in our public universities, all under the rubric of what employers “want” from graduates.) In this way, academic discourse’s power relies on its ability to control the production of valued knowledge and forms of literacy in our society in the particular ways granted by other institutions. If it performs in accordance with these dictates, schooling retains its privileged status as the “space” of knowledge production and the arbiter of economic success for its citizens through its certification of who can be said to “know.”

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The cultural currency of such knowledge and literate abilities allows academic discourse to produce a concomitant will or desire to gain that knowledge. This will to knowledge encourages us to “choose” to pursue success through the route prescribed by the discourse: its institution. As such, the institution becomes that which embodies academic discourse’s will to knowledge, and through knowledge, material power. Foucault explains this connection between a discourse’s will to knowledge and the institution by asserting that such a will is orchestrated through the formation’s institutional embodiment. The will to knowledge relies on the institution’s “support and distribution” (“Discourse” 219). The institution, in this case school or the academy, organizes the power relations of its discourse with that of other discursive formations. As such, the institution is seen as the venue by which students can gain the knowledge that other societal discourses (i.e., economics, government, religion, etc.) deem important and necessary. The will to knowledge, then, is not simply the students’ desire to gain the type of knowledge academic discourse produces, although for some students it might be. In its links to other discursive formations, academic discourse creates a will to knowledge because it is the only way to achieve success in these other realms. It is precisely this connection that we see in the literacy autobiographies. Although the students are writing in four different classes, with pedagogies focused on differing theories of identity and culture (from community-based pedagogies to more poststructural concepts of identity), they overwhelmingly describe the benefits of using schooled language in economic terms. In short, the local conditions of the classroom seem to have little effect on how the students perceive the cultural currency of academic discourse, and thus their desire to identify with it. The literacy autobiographies evince a clear will to knowledge in precisely the terms our cultural rhetoric lays out: schooling = economic success. The (student) writers seek facility with schooled language, that is, because of the power such cultural capital will grant them economically and civically: a way of ensuring both their futures and the approval of current authorities in their lives. The literacy autobiographies express frustration about the distant, exterior, and inaccessible nature of academic discourse because their authors feel such power is being withheld from them; thus, they seek to return to an identified relationship with the discourse in order to access this power. The chief characteristic of this desire is the writers’ willingness to learn the language of the academy. In this way, the writers demonstrate their intuitions about academic discourse’s will to knowledge (a technology of power), while placing the ability to access the power of academic discourse in its language and literacy practices (a technology of sign systems). Further, such practices are presumed to ensure material success and happiness (a technology of self ) through the ability to produce in a capitalist economy (a technology of production). In the autobiographies, such desire is closely linked to the status identifying with academic discourse grants one in realms beyond the academy to negotiate

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social relations. The graduate students’ texts articulate this connection most clearly since they have already experienced many of the rewards this status can embody. Holly, for example, describes her ostracized status within social circles because of what she labels her “geek” status, a result of her success in academics. She does not, however, ever remember wanting to give up this position because she wanted the approval of authority (defined as her mother and teachers). The approval of authorities (i.e., their cultural capital within the institutions of school and family) outweighs any social deficit among her peers. In contrast, Janet attributes her status with her cohort to her literacy. Her ability to write won her the respect of her classmates and a place on the senior committee. Her classmates assumed her writing ability would hold them in good stead because Janet “would be able to generate reports to our principal that would be so clever they would help us squeeze our way around some of the rules and regulations about planning events.” Social acceptance, in this case, relies on how literacy allows Janet to manipulate institutional authority. In both cases, Holly’s and Janet’s “literate” labels allow them to win the approval of others and to move up in their estimation, that is, to increase their cultural capital in social relations. The value schooled language confers is also described in more explicitly economic terms. Such economic benefits, in fact, seem to undergird the students’ ability to refigure social relations. The way schooled language ability can lead to a valued position in society is probably nowhere more clearly linked to capitalism than in the references to academics as competition made by half the male graduate students. Such continual references to competition metaphorically invoke a link between capitalist values and the power conferred by schooled literacy’s exchange value. For example, Rich extends the ability to “win” in school to success in the business world by describing the winners of reading competitions as “toting a great big pile of books to add to their already massive resumes” (my emphasis). Both John and Rich refer to their schooling as a career throughout their texts. Mark, upon his return to college after failing his first semester, decided almost immediately to pursue a graduate degree because he wanted the power that the professors he held in “awe” had: “I realized that I wanted to command such power over books, ideas, and students.” In the most explicitly economic connection, Janet comments on how her schooled literacy was the primary factor in her receiving a desirable position at a large insurance company after she graduated from college. She further attributes her subsequent promotions to being knowledgeable about school language. The basic writers also seem to intuit the relationship between their “resumes” and success with academic discourse; however, the status given through success with the discourse is something that they, like Mark, want to achieve because of the power it will grant them in the future. As opposed to the few (seven) basic writers who currently see their schooled language as a signifier of power in realms other than school, twenty-two autobiographies comment on the ability to use schooled language as a way of gaining power and achieving respect

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and status within society. As Spiro puts it, “being able to read and write are two very important things in life. You can’t be active in society without them.” Although the inability to use schooled language in effective ways could keep the writers from being active in and functional members of society, schooled language will help them attain the status they desire because schooled literacy, as Dan acknowledges, creates “language bosses,” a position he would like to find himself in one day. Inherent in Dan’s terminology of “boss” is an image of the status schooled literacy confers, according him power over people and within an economic system. Similarly, Diane realizes that she does not yet use “proper English,” but she appreciates the “corrections” made by her teachers in high school because she knew she had to “speak proper English if I expected to successful.” While the texts usually express how schooled language can impart a certain status within society overtly, such references are not always so clear. Swati’s text, for example, implies this link through imagery. She begins her text with a description of waiting for her mother to pick her up from school in their new Lexus. As she looks for her mother, “anxiously waiting to see the luxurious family car,” she is prompted to enter into a flashback of her arrival in the United States and her literacy history. It is the overt symbol of status and power—the Lexus—that is inextricably tied to her concern for school literacy. Desiring the power granted through academic discourse is not surprising considering the value our society puts on facility with schooled language, a value the students continue to perpetuate even in their current frustrations with their own writing, their institutional placement, and/or the intimidating language of professional English studies. Desiring to gain the knowledge the discourse can give them perpetuates the status of academic discourse as a route to liberation. Given the strength that the traditional belief in schooling as a means to economic success holds in our culture, it is no surprise that our students are likely to believe that school, indeed, is a means to material benefits in culture and to accept the meritocratic hierarchies it imposes. Even as composition’s rhetoric attempts to detach liberation from economics, multiple cultural discourses are there to ensure students that the formula of schooling = economic success = liberation operates powerfully in the social real. Students seek out the institutional discourses promised to provide economic security through cultural capital and, consequently, orchestrate their own subjectification. EM-BODYING DISCURSIVE DESIRE: ACADEMIC DISCOURSE’S POLITICS OF PLEASURE

That students might explain their desire for academic discourse in economic terms is certainly not surprising. The degree to which they do so, however, points to a desire for subjectification which functions more deeply than mere immersion in our culture’s rhetorics of schooling. Our students, to be sure, presume some degree of economic success to result from higher education, but

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they just as often admit that they know a college degree does not correlate with employment. Given how clearly our students can articulate the falseness of the schooling = economic success equation, we must ask why material conditions do not impact the way desire for academic discourse is expressed in the literacy autobiographies. What I suggest here is that the force of such a desire operates according to more than a discursive logic, and thus is not easily resisted. Instead, desire operates on both the discursive construction of thought and the bodily experience of culture as physical beings subject to both the pleasure of consumption and the oppressive effects of power on the material conditions of one’s life. Desire functions, that is, not only through effects of the mind (the connection between language and thought) but also according to the ways such discourses are “enfleshed” as part of the body’s experience of the social real. The realm of identity politics is both rhetorical and real. The “reality” of capital is, on the simplest level, an unavoidable fact of social being in U.S. culture. Our students live in a world in which poverty equates with oppression of body (homelessness, prison, starvation, poor or nonexistent health care), welfare has been gutted, and job opportunities without education become fewer and fewer. Although they know a college degree does not necessarily mean high-paying employment, they see the devaluation of the poor and working classes on a daily basis. In such a world, choosing to opt out of the capitalist credo to produce is seemingly to choose oppression. As Peter McLaren and Ramin Farahmandpur so provocatively put it, within such a world, “capitalist hegemony digs its bony talons into the structure of subjectivity itself ” as “traditionally secure factory work is replaced by the feckless insecurity of McJobs, as the disadvantaged are cast about in the icy wind of world commodity price fluctuations, as the comprador elite expands its power base in the financial precincts of the postmodern necropolis, and as the White House redecorates itself in the forms-fits-function architectonic of neo-liberalism” (84). Capitalism permeates every aspect of life in U.S. society as subjectivity becomes linked to economic status and the power to consume. As such, the persuasiveness of the economics = liberation equation does not operate only by threatening physical well-being. Instead, capitalism digs its talons into the body much more insidiously by becoming connected to desire and, through desire, pleasure. In a post-Fordist version of capital, we may have disconnected desire from “the production of labor per se,” but pleasure may still be seen as “the affective signification of that striving” toward capitalist desire (Macdonald 23). Ensuring one’s pleasure translates to attaining the capital necessary to purchase the quality of life and material goods through which pleasure is defined. Connecting subjectification to pleasure also allows us to examine how desire for subjectification is more than an imposition of ideology; instead, it is embedded in the material conditions one seeks to control and the affective investments one makes in living culture in particular ways.

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identity matters Ursula Kelly makes these connections clearly: The instability of the psyche . . . is best marked in the displacement of desire onto unattainable fantasies of wholeness and satisfaction accessed through the social. In this sense, the social acts pedagogically in that it proffers the illusion of satisfaction while banking on inevitable absence and dissatisfaction, and in its own processes, offers subject positions with which to identify and from which subjects may feel in control of desire—the materialization of the illusion. (33)

Desire, in this way, still refers to lack in the more psychoanalytic sense, but lack refigured through modes of production and consumption over which we can presume control. The ability to consume becomes inextricably linked to maintaining autonomy. The cultural capital gained through a body that signifies certain literate abilities allows students a certain control over their material conditions: their status with others increases, as Janet tells us, allowing for more favorable social relations; their power to produce economically is proffered through the promise of jobs; their influence over others accords them power in social relations by proving to the “rich kids” they are of equal ability; their ability to own the right kinds of goods—Swati’s invocation of the Lexus—accords them pleasure by satisfying consumptive desire. By “turning ourselves into subjects,” the writers imply that we can, through the economic status and cultural capital such a discourse might grant us, better control our ability to consume, our pleasure, and even the construction of our subjectivity. Controlling subjectivity becomes inextricable from “completing” subjectivity, from fulfilling the lack that undergirds the desires the students express in economic terms. As McLaren asserts, “capitalism engenders a socially constructed dialectics of desire—a libidinal economy of sorts—in which fantasy is mobilized in order to search for a substitute for a ‘lack,’ that is, to discover a material object to substitute for a mythical object we lack ‘in reality’ and which we feel we need to complete our subjectivity” (Predatory, original emphasis, 71). In short, we activate both conscious and unconscious processes in favor of constructing our own subjectivity and take great pleasure in the acts of consumption by which we hope to “complete” that subjectivity. Material conditions help us specify the nature of this lack—the failure of body to signify in ways that allow one to control their social interactions, fulfill their need for consumer goods, and achieve the kinds of respect and status the social real accords only particular kinds of subjects. Simultaneously, discourses, such as the liberatory rhetoric of schooling, specify how this lack might be filled in accordance with the material dictates our bodies encounter daily. The pleasure we receive through efforts to fulfill such lack, particularly in consumptive practices, embeds desire firmly within affect as well as mind. Structures of affect—of feeling, of pleasure—operate at the level of the body and are rarely impacted by only discursive intervention. We may “say” we “know” that

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schooling need not lead to material success, but experience and affect are not necessarily impacted by an expression of reality. Affectively, we might still invest deeply in that which we claim to eschew. Elspeth Probyn’s distinction between kinds of experience is useful in highlighting this seeming disconnect between what we might be able to realize epistemologically (as an act of mind) and what we might do or how we live ontologically (as body). On the ontological level, experiences of and in a material world are experienced as “the felt facticity of material social being” (Sexing 21–22). The epistemological level, on the other hand, attempts to bridge the gap between the articulation of experience (how we know it and describe it to ourselves and others) and its lived facticity of feeling. As Probyn puts it, “at an ontological level, experience speaks of a disjuncture between the articulated and the lived aspects of the social and, at an epistemological level, experience impels analysis of the relations formulated between the articulated and the lived” (22). This disjuncture between experience as it is lived and as it is articulated points to a gap between how we might interpret and internalize experience. Like Raymond Williams’s elucidation of structures of feeling as a key aspect of cultural interactions, Probyn’s perspective acknowledges that identities, as they are lived in the social real, do not announce themselves as cultural in the same ways our attempts to make meaning of them do. We may recognize the potential falsehood of liberatory rhetorics yet still take great pleasure, and invest much energy, in subjectification processes that experientially seem to offer the best means of completing and controlling our subjectivity. We seek Foucault’s “state of happiness” through the pursuit of wholeness, mediated through consumptive practices, that may be epistemologically suspect yet ontologically satisfying to both self and social being. Such a disconnect can exist because desire for economic success is never solely about capital, as the literacy autobiographies attest. It is embedded in social relations that help us sustain not only our own sense of self but also our social investments with others. Subjectification is just as often activated in response to seeking “respect” from others (e.g., authorities, family) as it is merely for simple economic gain. Desire incites subjectification because we experience culture not discursively or ideologically but as peopled. As Paul Trembath argues, culture does not present itself as discourse, but instead bodies within culture serve “as the mediators of social events in place of the disembodied exteriority of culture” (133), making bodies the central “presence of cultural influence” (136). One of the features of existence, for Trembath, includes the body’s ability to sense, as Deleuze explains it in the double meaning of the word in the French, which “at once means ‘meaning’ and ‘the senses’” (137, original emphasis). Sensual activity, in this light, becomes a making of meaning through an act of signification but also an act of feeling, sensing, and being; in short, a structure of affect inseparable from meaning-making activity. What an attention to sensual relations and the body as the site of social mediation explains is how ideological relations are produced within bodies as well as between and among bodies in

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their affective relations to each other and the world. In short, the body becomes a locus of differentiation where active productive forces interact with reactive ideological ones. In this way, the body—replete with its corporeality and affective investments—“is not opposed to culture, a resistant throw-back to a natural past; it is itself a cultural, the cultural product . . . a site of social, political, cultural, and geographical inscriptions, production, or constitution” (Grosz 23). Body becomes the relay point where discursive relations and material conditions meet to construct desire for particular kinds of identities. McLaren perhaps best clarifies the relations among body, desire, discourse, and the material world most succinctly through his concept of enfleshment. Enfleshment refers to “the mutually constitutive (enfolding) of social structure and desire: the dialectical relationship between the material organization of interiority and the cultural forms and modes of materiality we inhabit subjectively” (Predatory 47). How discourse may incite the “organization of interiority” is inseparable from the bodies it interacts with and those bodies’ experiences in the social real. Discursively ordered subject positions, that is, are inhabited through acts of desire, body, affect, and experience of social relations, as well as through one’s social activity in learning to produce particular kinds of texts. In the autobiographies, this discursive material connection surfaces in how desire is constructed and enacted in favor of identification with academic discourse’s subject positions. ENACTING DESIRE: REWRITING IDENTIT Y WITHIN ACADEMIC DISCOURSE

The literacy autobiography writers also illustrate the consequences of such desire: willingly constructing identifications with academic discourse. Although the writers do not want a wholesale change in identity, they do accept the necessity of needing to alter their ways of thinking, speaking, and writing as the only way to pursue their choice of material success. In their descriptions of the “change” necessary to enact their desire to fulfill academic discourse’s subject positions, the students continually invoke images of control, suggesting that control over subjectivity may be precisely what is gained through rewriting identity within academic discourse. Such descriptions, I suspect, also indicate the workings of pleasure and affect that motivate such desire just as strongly as the more overtly expressed desire for economic success and cultural status, accounting for both the strength of that desire and a willingness to alter identity in favor of completing the lack that initiates such changes. Gaining the status and power they desire is complicated for the basic writers by the fact that they do not yet feel in control of the language they need to achieve it. For example, Dominic expresses great frustration with the “great works” of literature, lamenting that “no matter how hard I worked at English I could never be any good at it.” “Being good at English” is closely linked to achieving control over a discourse with which he does not feel identified. Control over language becomes linked, further, with control over perception. For

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example, Diane expresses this need for discursive control when she explains that her weakness in writing is making her point clear. This need to “make a point” recurs at three points in her narrative, and she returns to it in response to her instructor’s question of what the class members would change if they had the chance to revise the essay. Her teacher’s comments on her literacy autobiography also reflect this need; the comments focus solely on a lack of purpose. A writer making a point, or achieving a purpose, implies the ability to organize and present her thoughts about the world in such a way that her audience understands them. Thus, the organization of perception needs to mirror Diane’s audience’s—her teacher’s—perception. Diane’s emphasis on not being able to make a point implies that she cannot yet organize her perceptions in the ways academic discourse would have her do. Diane, however, desires this control over schooled language so that she can make a point, implying that she’s willing to change her perspective to achieve this. Ben’s autobiography presents perhaps the clearest example of how academic discourse seeks to change a student’s way of seeing the world. Ben makes this connection through an anecdote that, at first glance, seems strange and out of place in a literacy narrative. Ben describes being sent to the principal’s office in an early primary grade because he failed to color the trees in a picture according to the directions of the teacher. After an assessment by the school nurse, the principal discovers that Ben could not do the assignment because he was color blind. Although color blindness seems to have no relation to literacy, Ben’s text conflates the two: “The reason I feel this had such an impact on my literacy is because that teacher yelled at me for something I had no control over.” Connecting this anecdote with literacy is telling. Ben ties literacy to something that seemingly had nothing to do with reading and writing; instead, it focuses on control and the frustration of not being able to understand and perceive the world in the way his teacher did. Control over perception becomes almost a definition of schooled literacy in the connection Ben makes between academic discourse and perception. Almost all of the basic writers comment that attaining societal status will require some sort of change in them and their relationship to discourse. Given the way the texts link achieving control with academic discourse to gaining control over perception, we can infer that what they depict only as an ambiguous change may, in fact, be an interiorization of academic discourse. “Change” is then a shift in the way they perceive the world, a shift representative of the discourse’s worldview. The writers in this study, particularly the basic writers, realize that the discourse that will give them the power and status they desire also has the power to act upon them, to change or shape their “selves” to it. Images of change, as a result, are almost always connected to giving up control over subjectivity to the discourse, of deliberately seeking out the change in perspective and literate practices it seeks to orchestrate. In their images, we apparently choose to desire certain forms of power and status, and thus participate in our own

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subjectification through our agency to make this choice. Thus, the writers seemingly invoke the two meanings of identification I am using here: identification as consubstantiality with the language they seek to use, and identification as the process by which we “suture” self to the subject positions made available to us. Cassandra’s autobiography is the least forceful about the need for a change in her relationship to discourse. Her narrative merely implies this change in its shifting terminology. In the beginning of her text, Cassandra describes herself as “Cassandra, the great essay writer.” At the end of the text, she becomes “Cassandra, the hardworking essay writer,” implying that there is still work to be done on her ways of using language before she can return to the “great essay writer” status that conferred many rewards in the past. She does, however, imply that regaining this status will involve allowing the discourse to gain control over her. Whenever Cassandra writes about losing control with academic discourse, moments cast as negative experiences, personal pronouns disappear from the nominative position in her sentences. When Cassandra writes about her positive experiences with schooled language, her text presents sentences such as: “I was a good writer,” or “I was praised by all my teachers as being an excellent writer.” In contrast, when the text comments on problems with schooled writing, the discourse, not the self, takes the subject position: “My experience with writing had its ups and downs,” or “My essay writing seem to defaulter.” Significantly, when her writing takes the nominative position, we also see a dramatic increase in “errors” in Edited American English, visually invoking the very lack of control about which she is writing. The discourse, then, achieves control over her until she can achieve identification with it—until the “I” changes in such a way that it can again be equated with the discourse that can confer upon her the status she was once accorded. Joe’s autobiography is slightly more explicit about giving up control over his language to discourse. Joe, another basic writer, mentions that college has taught him to be “less manipulative” with his writing. “College has totally changed the way I perceive my writing style,” his text reports. “Now I feel more lax on areas where I would like to stress a point. . . . College has taught me to take life as it is and there is more to life than trying to control other people’s lives.” The need to give up control, to be “less manipulative” and realize that he cannot be in control of these changes over himself and his writing, imply that “taking life as it is” might be equated with “taking discourse as it is” and letting it gain control over him. Not all the autobiographies submerge the nature of the change in inadvertent connections. Latisha’s text, for example, explicitly states that change is necessary in order to gain power: “To make myself successful, a drastic change of giving direct attention towards what I’m trying to present is needed” (my emphasis). Zeeva’s text begins to suggest what this change might entail. Zeeva writes that “I might not be such a great writer at this point but I know that I enjoy writing and hopefully will improve.” One sentence later, however, she writes that “being

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able to read and write can expand the minds of the most narrow-minded people.” In the reference to Zeeva as a writer not fully able to control and use academic discourse’s language, her text implicitly links Zeeva with the “narrow-minded people” whose minds will be expanded through the ability to read and write, implying that it is her thinking and ways of seeing the world that will be changed as well as her reading and writing practices. Lori’s narrative is even more overt about the nature of the change acquiring power with academic discourse necessitates. Lori introduces her literacy autobiography by talking about the power that words can impart. Later in her text, she provides us with a picture of what attaining this power might require. Lori tells the reader that she hates writing because of the need for control through conscious manipulation. She writes that it is too much work “to take personal observation and reference points and compact them into concept symbols that can be read intelligently. It basically is a lot of mental gymnastics.” Discourse requires a certain type of control over personal ideas in order for those ideas, or the writer’s intention, to be expressed in a way that will be “understood.” Achieving this control is depicted as an act of shifting the ideas in ways that contort them beyond what is considered their more natural state, just as the body in gymnastics moves and jumps in ways that seem almost to defy our physical limitations. In her image of contortion, Lori suggests she will need to change not only her language, but also her entire relationship to academic discourse, in order for such control to begin to be more natural. Tim provides one of the most encompassing articulations of this change. His text demonstrates how the self must become subsumed by academic discourse in order to gain the status it can impart. Tim writes that he feels as if he suffered a “loss of English” in the transition from high school to college, yet despite the fact that he “still hates” English, he knows that he has “to have it to make it in the real world.” The only way for him to “have it” again is to attempt to change his now powerless position within the discourse. He writes that “I know I must utilize the language that I am a part of if I want to be successful in the workforce” (my emphasis), and becoming “a functional part of society” in this way will require him to make a “complete . . . transition.” By alluding to Tim as “part of ” a discourse, rather than a user of this discourse, his text begins to suggest the primacy that academic discourse has over the self when a subject seeks to gain control of it. Yet Tim implies that he is willing to submit to this discursive control in order to be “successful in the workforce.” Rich, a graduate student, also makes the connection between power and his willingness to “take in” academic discourse, or let it reformulate at least part of his construction of self, in order to access this power: You have to talk the language in order to get yourself heard. And I remember knowing, quite early on, shy as I was, that I did indeed want to be heard. What I’ve known all along is that speaking is power: people who

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identity matters forge a voice that I can listen to have power to move me, a power that I love to experience. Their power empowers me. If I can forge for myself a like voice, if I can become a participant in whatever conversation happens to be in progress, I can enact power, and maybe, empower others with my words and my voice. . . . The words I can speak come from all these voices, and they are me, and also they seem to have an odd life of their own, speaking from a voice that seems to come from outside of human ken. (my emphasis)

Rich acknowledges that the voice he wants is something that “seems to come from outside of human ken,” thus something over which he has little control. Yet, he wants to take in words he realizes aren’t his own so he “can forge for myself a like voice,” or exercise a technology of the self. Rich is willing to “take in” an exterior discourse, and thus become a subject of it, so he can then “enact [the] power” he feels the discourse’s other subjects already wield. In all these images, the autobiographies demonstrate how the writers exercise a technology of self: (1) The writers acquiesce to academic discourse’s will to knowledge by desiring the power they believe it has in other societal realms. (2) The writers presume gaining such power is intimately connected to control over the discourse, and, thus, over self. And, (3) they willingly submit to its subjugation by accepting that a change in self will be necessary to gain this power. By linking the desire to acquire power with a necessary change in self, the autobiographies speak to a future interiorization of academic discourse much like the one they expressed as already taking place in their past interactions with academic discourse. In sum, the writers assume that internalizing academic discourse is a prerequisite to attaining its power. Despite their indications of how internalizing discursive positions in the past led to undesirable effects, the students still place great value in the discourse. Their assumptions about its will to knowledge are strong; they have faith that turning themselves into subjects will have positive results. Changes in identity, then, are not approached with fear or a sense of ultimate oppression and/or repression of a more true self. Instead, in their expressions of frustration with their current writing struggles, the writers seem to seek out new enunciative modalities of the discourse to internalize: They seek the kind of control they no longer feel they have. This desire for further subjectification is not surprising given the power the writers were once accorded for successful participation. While the students may not be seeking a change in their way of thinking or inviting new identities to their self-constitution, they are seeking the status and power the discourse provides only its speaking subjects. CARE FOR SELF AND SOCIAL BODY

Such promises of power and status, we must remember, are not entirely false. Rather than an oppressive process, the literacy autobiographies suggest that constructing identifications with academic discourse is actually a choice in favor of one’s own agency. Although schooling’s liberatory rhetoric does not ensure

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such power, it is presented as the primary means to “care for oneself ” in seeking out possibilities for agency. As such, the desire constructed for academic discourse’s subject positions can never be only about supporting schooling; instead, school works as a seeming route to liberation as a way of ensuring the maintenance of the status quo. Here’s the rub. While not obviously an oppressive act, subjectification in academic discourse simultaneously ensures the continuation of the very oppressive conditions students may be seeking to escape or the imposition of power they want to control. It promises control over subjectivity, and grants it to some extent, but a control situated firmly within current discursive material-relations that allows for agency by preventing social change. The maintenance of individual agency, that is, cannot be separated from the benefits the social body gains by offering such routes to agency for individual subjects. Within a capitalist society, such a care for self functions not just to ensure individual pleasure and agency, but also to guarantee the maintenance of the body politic itself in which such desires were formulated. Foucault discusses this concept of care for self most clearly in The Use of Pleasure where he describes how the technology of the self was inextricably linked to a certain care for the self in classical Greece. Rather than being coupled with the will to knowledge, the technology of the self was connected to an aesthetic or ethic. This aesthetic refers to how individuals constituted themselves as moral subjects. Such an aesthetic results from a specific relationship to the mode of subjection (i.e., the technology of power), wherein individuals transformed themselves into acceptable subjects according to expectations about morality. They accomplished such a transformation in order to be considered a “good citizen” by others and themselves. As a result, this particular technology of the self, whereby individuals turned themselves into acceptable subjects, was related to the care for the self, an attempt to formulate oneself in such a way that one could see oneself as “good.” Rather than following rules outlined by moral institutions, achieving “goodness” was accomplished through an individual’s actions upon himself. It was, Foucault tells us, a deliberate practice of liberty: “In order to behave properly, in order to practice freedom properly, it was necessary to care for self, both in order to know one’s self . . . and to improve one’s self, to surpass one’s self, to master the appetites that risk engulfing you” (“Ethic” 5). Caring for self—ensuring one’s own liberty—thus became linked to a technology of self, a willingness to analyze and construct self within the social. Although the moral aesthetic by which one cares for oneself has remained linked to institutions and “rules” of conduct since Christian times, I believe Foucault’s discussion of the Greek ethic of care has interesting implications for how technologies of the self might interact with academic discourse in the twenty-first century context of U.S. education. As Foucault explains in a late interview, how an individual accedes to a certain mode of being and transforms herself in order to attain this mode of being is still linked to a care for the self. The goal of this care, however, has shifted. Rather than seeking to attain freedom

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through transforming oneself into a moral subject, the individual believes the route to freedom is through transforming herself into a knowing subject (“Ethic” 14–15). In the cultural logic I’ve been pursuing here, the knowing subject of U.S. culture is the schooled subject, and the schooled subject is economically successful. Such economic success becomes the primary determinant of “behaving properly” in our culture because such a subject does not present a “drain” on the limited resources by which such an economy functions. When one cares for self economically, he is then “free” to pursue happiness and is seen by others as deserving of such happiness. When he does not, he is blamed for his economic failure and the variety of social ills that purportedly result from being poor in this country: gang violence, drug addiction, broken families. . . . I could make a much longer list, but one need only think of the recent welfare reform arguments demonizing poor mothers, look to the way poor parents are assumed to be “uninvolved” in education rhetoric, or to the presumed “laziness” of those not economically successful that characterizes so much everyday talk and conservative politics in our society. Liberal politics offer a similar demonization through victimization rhetoric, which presumes the economically disadvantaged subject has no agency. Only those who behave properly have the power to control their interactions with culture; others have culture act upon them because, presumably, if they had more agency, they too would be good, economically successful subjects. Whatever position one takes politically, the link between care for self and economic status is difficult to ignore. In their recurring images of “control,” the literacy autobiographies intuitively demonstrate how agency is linked to such a care for self. Economic status indicates how much control one is given in our society over the material and social conditions of everyday life. Such control extends beyond economic status: It also leads to achieving respect from others and ensuring one’s social acceptance, resulting in subjectification processes that also provide us much pleasure. Economic status, through a presentation of self as knowledgeable in “appropriate ways,” is deeply embedded in both the social and material relations of culture as it is lived. The ability to signify such “good citizenship” then offers significant benefits to both the social body and the individual. As such, the desire to identify with academic discourse also operates in favor of the subject’s agency: It provides the preconditions to freedom as well as social respect and good citizenship. The care for self, that is, is also a care for agency and autonomy, a way to ensure the fulfillment of desire to live culture in particular kinds of ways. Filling out the equation I’ve been drawing here, the care for self adds one additional element: schooling = economic success = care for self = liberation. Subjectification in discourse functions in favor of both the body politic and the individual body by ensuring its freedom to act in its own best interests. In this way, academic discourse sets up an equation wherein power serves a dual function, always both repressive and productive. In Foucault’s formulation, the very concepts and beliefs that seemingly embody freedom (and

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frequently do offer the precise benefits they allege) also function to ensure the exercise of power: Where the determining factors saturate the whole there is no relationship of power; slavery is not a power relationship when man is in chains. . . . Consequently there is no face to face confrontation of power and freedom which is mutually exclusive (freedom disappears everywhere power is exercised), but a much more complicated interplay. In this game freedom may well appear as the condition for the exercise of power (at the same time its precondition, since freedom must exist for power to be exerted, and also its permanent support, since without the possibility of recalcitrance, power would be equivalent to a physical domination). (“The Subject” 221)

These dual functions of power—repression and freedom—always go hand-inhand. Discursive formations not only oppress but also produce concepts that allow humans freedom. In this light, capitalism and power/knowledge relations are not simply a means of ideological interpellation imposed upon subjects. Rather, because of the benefits subjectification offers, we actively pursue it, and, indeed, take pleasure in constructing identifications with it, not only accepting, the literacy autobiographies tell us, but also desiring the changes in perspective it might bring out. Such subjectification is not pursued as a willingness to cede control of self to the discourse but rather as a desire to gain the means to control one’s happiness in the social real. As Hall describes it, the care for self ’s role in subjectification evinces how Foucault “tacitly recognizes that it is not enough for the Law to summon, discipline, produce and regulate, but there must also be the corresponding production of a response (and thus the capacity and apparatus of subjectivity) from the side of the subject” (“Who” 12). This response is orchestrated by seeking discursive identifications that allow one to care for self, bearing witness to our own role in seemingly choosing our identifications. We do not, then, execute a technology of self in favor of our own oppression, but again, in a typical Foucauldian twist, in favor of our own liberation. We see subjectification, when we recognize it, as dissociated from the forces of power. This disassociation may be exactly what we have inherited from the Greeks, an “exercise that enabled one to govern oneself” that is “detached both from power as a relations between forces, and from knowledge as a stratified form, or ‘code’ of virtue” (Deleuze, original emphasis, 100). THE INDIVIDUAL’S SENSE OF AUTONOMY AND THE SOCIAL ACT OF LITERACY

Technologies of the self are central to understanding the complexities of subject production yet only sketch the larger picture of why we seek out particular subject positions. How such a process occurs, however, is equally embedded in

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the desire for agency and Being as they have been defined in our historical moment. While we desire identifications with a given discourse because of how its language signifies in the social real, we internalize that discourse in accordance with a material-psychoanalytic desire for agency and completeness. We interiorize particular subject positions through the social activity of reading and writing language, our desire to control our use of that language, and through that use, our material interactions with others in the social real. It is through the material manifestation of technologies of signs— through the social activity of reading and writing schooled language—that we conduct the technology of self the students indicate as necessary for agency. According to Foucault, as long as humans continue to believe they control power relationships and their own access to knowledge (the causal link described in the literacy autobiographies), the “reality” of power can produce itself endlessly on human subjects. The literacy autobiographies clearly invoke this sense of control in their authors’ identified relationships with the discourse. Unlike the “them” of academic discourse versus the “we” who are outside it, the autobiographies speak to their own power when identified: I am successful in school; I aced the test. In taking on the discourse’s power as one’s own, the writers not only indicate their own subjectification within the discourse but also the belief in autonomy it provides them. Thus, while subjects perform a productive function in relationship to power by perpetuating its existence, discourse also offers them a belief in their own power to act as agents upon the world. Foucault continually returns to this point: “Discipline ‘manufactures’ individuals; it is the specific technique of a power which takes individuals at one and the same time as objects and as the instruments by means of which it is exercised” (Ewald 171). The success of discursive power depends on its subjects: More importantly, it depends on a subject who does not recognize himself as such. This connection between our presumption of agency and the execution of power illustrates, yet again, how power relationships can only appear where freedom is presumed. This concept applies equally well to our freedom to perceive self in ways that seem most able to afford us control over our lives and the construction of our own identities. Karlis Racevskis interprets this relationship among freedom, power, and the presumption of agency most clearly: “A subject is that which is amenable to the effects of power: it is the handle by which power takes a hold of/on individual human beings. For power to be effective, humans have to be subjected in the name of their being—that is, there has to be a ‘being’ serving as an alibi if the process of subjection is to be effective” (23). By presuming the ontological status of Being—our ability to act upon the world in powerful ways that refer back only to our own autonomy—we perpetuate the very presumptions about subjectivity that are so central to both technologies of power and self. We support, that is, the presumption that the choices we make function in favor of our own individual actions in the world and attempts to care for self within its material realms.

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Through multiple discourses, we are offered such a belief in our autonomy, manifested in the cult of individualism in U.S. society commented on by so many cultural critics. Tied to rhetorics of democracy, liberalism, conservatism, and capitalism, such a belief in the autonomous individual is further supported by our experience as bodies, physically bounded as they are, as distinct entities operating in the material world. Our bodies serve to assure us that we act upon culture—since we “obviously” do so physically on our natural environment and in interactions with other people—rather than culture acting upon us. Escaping individuality is almost impossible because it is imposed both by our own immersion in discourse and the actions of others in the social real who recognize us as distinct and autonomous. In this way, both our material and discursive experiences of the world operate to create a more ontological form of desire best summarized by Butler’s interpretation of Hegel: “the incessant human effort to overcome external differences, a project to become a self-sufficient subject for whom all things apparently different finally emerge as immanent features of the subject herself” (Subjects 6). Although I obviously dispute the ontological nature of such desire, its effects on subjectification are significant. Our desire to be “self-sufficient,” that is, incites the processes of subjectification on which discourse relies. As Foucault explains, This form of power applies itself to immediate everyday life which categorizes the individual, marks him by his own individuality, attaches him to his own identity, imposes a law of truth on him which he must recognize and which others have to recognize in him. It is a form of power which makes individuals subjects. There are two meanings to the word subject: subject to someone else by control and dependence, and tied to his own identity by a conscience or self-knowledge. Both meanings suggest a form of power which subjugates and makes subject to. (“Subject” 212)

Internalizing discourse becomes the means by which we both maintain our self and subjugate it simultaneously. Discourses use our presumptions about the ontological status of Being, not recognized as an historical production, to produce a subject who will seek to interiorize a discourse’s perspective. In a sense, then, we create our own prison through our assumptions about self. As Terry Eagleton declares, “the shackling of the subject is from within—and . . . this shackling is itself nothing less than our very forms of subjectivity themselves” (100–01). How a belief in autonomy encourages us to internalize discursive positions is illustrated nowhere more clearly than in the site of language production. If language is presumed to operate as the reflection of consciousness, then the languages we employ must seem to be our own and capable of reflecting our own unique thought and identity in the world. Foucault implies the necessity of such internalization in favor of agency in his definition of discourse: “ . . . discourse is not the majestically unfolding manifestation of a thinking, knowing,

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speaking subject, but, on the contrary, a totality, in which the dispersion of the subject and his discontinuity with himself may be determined. It is a space of exteriority in which a network of distinct sites is deployed” (Archaeology 55). Discourse always exists in an exterior position to its subjects; even when we fill the positions created for speaking subjects, we have become part of something exterior. Such dispersion between self and language, however, threatens to undercut a belief in ourselves as autonomous users of language. Our immersion in discourse, that is, severs the connection between our own self-knowledge and the languages we employ. This incongruity initiates a desire to suture the self to the discursive positions we already desire. Although Foucault does not comment on how humans come to interiorize an exterior discourse, linking his comments about the dispersion of the subject with the information in the literacy autobiographies points to our role in this process. Because humans see ourselves as individuals, or autonomous beings, we seek identification with the languages we speak. Our belief in our own autonomy cannot allow us to accept the dispersion Foucault refers to. As a result, we seek to erase our sense of discontinuity by identifying with the discourse that makes us aware of this dispersion through its exteriority from us. We seek to internalize a discourse’s perspective in order to submerge our sense that this language we speak is somehow separate from us, or not a “real” reflection of our thoughts: our sense that a discourse may be controlling us rather than us controlling it. (Recall that the literacy autobiographies, in fact, indicated a willingness to interiorize a discourse’s perspective primarily within images of control over language and meaning, and the frustration at the lack of it.) Presuming we are the source of meaning, as Michael Pecheux argues, is the inaugural move in subjectification: “Individuals are constituted as subjects through the discursive formation, a process of subjection in which the individual is identified as subject to the discursive formation in a structure of misrecognition (the subject thus presented as the source of meanings of which it is an effect” (qtd. in Heath, Stephen 7, my emphasis). Our deliberate misrecognition of discursive apparati in favor of our own autonomy orchestrates a move toward suture. By internalizing the discourse, we can perceive its language as our own and that which serves our purposes. This need to internalize a discourse is expressed clearly in the autobiographies, particularly in the students’ comments about the discomfort and frustration caused by academic discourse’s seemingly inaccessible nature. As Patty mentioned, she believes she really only learned to write in graduate school. The new manifestation of academic discourse that is “grad school” language must become internalized for Patty to again feel she is a writer, an autonomous producer of language. Each new manifestation of discourse redefines our notion of what is real and should feel authentic, creating a discontinuity between our sense of our selves and the discourse. Because of this discontinuity, we need to identify with the discourse—need to internalize the portion of it apparent in a linguistic manifestation that distances it from us—in order to become part of what we

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perceive as real. That being disidentified from the discourses we seek to use results in psychic as well as material forms of distress is illustrated nowhere more clearly than in the literacy autobiographies’ descriptions of the feelings invoked by division. As Vicki so tellingly described it, writing a language that was not her own was so painful it made her body cry out for a drink and a cigarette. Something more than control is at issue here for Vicki; the trauma induced in language production bespeaks a concern for self as body and feeling. Constructing identifications with particular discursive positions we seek to fill—suturing self and discourse—is seemingly essential to maintaining self. In this way, internalizing a discourse’s subject positions as part of identity functions not only to signify certain modes of being in the social real. The process also assures us of our very existence and Being ontologically—a way of maintaining a concept of self we can literally “live with.” Rather than locking us into a “postmodern prison” through discursive constitution, such constitution creates the very possibilities for Being. Butler perhaps puts this movement most clearly in The Psychic Life of Power: “ . . . if, following Foucault, we understand power as forming the subject as well as providing the very condition of its existence and the trajectory of its desire, then power is not simply what we oppose but also, in a strong sense, what we depend on for our existence and what we harbor and preserve in the beings that we are” (2, original emphasis). In Butler’s terms, this move from exteriorization to interiorization should not be seen as subjection, for it is not an imposition of a repressive force. Instead, subject production becomes the very process by which we become individuals and actors in the world. The productive effects of power also illustrate how the presumption of agency not only comes to produce our own subjectification but also inevitably affects identity in ways that may not be as open to construction as Hall implies in his definition of identity as the “temporary attachment to subject positions” (“Who?” 2). Instead, in the ongoing work connecting psychoanalysis with discourse and ideology, we are beginning to see how such identification may be the very condition by which identity is initiated. Butler, for example, links identification with a discourse to the unconscious processes that support it, offering a connection between discursive identification, and identification as it usually figures into subject formation in psychoanalysis. She suggests that the formation of the unconscious may, itself, be inseparable from discursive identification: “If the effect of autonomy is conditioned by subordination and that founding subordination or dependency is rigorously repressed, the subject emerges in tandem with the unconscious . . . the desire to survive, ‘to be,’ is a pervasively exploitable desire” (Psychic 7). If discursive identification is productive of the unconscious and the “I” itself—the very precondition by which we exist as self-conscious beings—then identifications cannot always be temporary. Rather, some identifications, even if they are subject to change, are necessary for the subject to exist as a seemingly autonomous “I.” Discursive identifications are the substantive

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material of Being, necessary to the production of the historically current concept of selfhood in U.S. society: the autonomous individual. Given the necessity of interiorization to preserve a belief in autonomous identity, it is not surprising that the (student) writers only comment on the ability of discourse to become a part of their selves when they perceive its division from them. In other contexts and time periods, academic discourse is them. THE BODY AND LITERACY: SIGNIFYING AND CONSTITUTING AGENCY

The discursive technology of autonomy, combined with the material inscription of desire for certain subject positions, exposes a cycle of subjectification in which our students (and all of us) are immersed. The agency to function in culture becomes the primary means through which technologies of power, self, sign systems, and production circulate to encourage identity constitution in accordance with power relations. We interiorize a discourse in response to our dispersion in the discourse, attempting to make its language our own to enact our intentions, and thus preserve our sense of body as individual and thought as a reflection of that individuated self. We seek out particular discursive positions in response to our desire to materially care for self and preserve that autonomy in the social real. In this way, discursive concepts of selfhood interact with material conditions to incite subjects to construct identity within culturally appropriate ways. Such desires for agency initiate and reinforce both our presumption of ontological Being and our more material concerns for social being and care for self as they manifest themselves in the specificity of our historical moment. Although taking on the subject positions of a given discourse as identity may have effects we later lament, they do offer the route to both material power and selfhood by which we seek them. Thus, despite poststructuralism’s insistence, subjectification is never solely a discursive process. Why students seek out academic discourse is inextricably tied to the material world and a concern for body: specifically, a body who uses language in ways that are valued beyond mere school success. Schooled language is pursued, that is, precisely because it indicates how a body might signify in the social real. Literacy practice signifies not only a constructed consciousness that thinks and knows in appropriate ways but also an appropriately desiring body. As Kelly explains, “if literacy practices frame how the social world is negotiated and understood—meaning as social relations—then literacy practices demarcate the body and its sign-ificance within the social. If discourses of desire (w)rest on the body, through subjectivity, then the body can be understood as a signifier of desire” (29). The subject who internalizes academic discourse’s subject positions becomes, surely, a subject of its discourse, but she is also able to use its language in ways that signify power and success within a capitalist culture. Since language is presumed to emerge from an autonomous body, secure in its individual physicality within the world, those who practice literacy “correctly” can further be

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presumed to inhabit appropriately ideological forms of subjectivity, enacting culture in ways that ensure the perpetuation of the status quo in the social real. For culture, the body/subject becomes a sign of the promise of capitalism, while the subject is assured that agency and individuality will be accorded her body as a result of her language use. Given its productive aspects, power cannot be seen as only negative. Rather, from a marginal student’s perspective, particularly a working-class kid like I once was, the agency offered via the discourse to “get me some” can’t be ignored. While subjectification may work in favor of agency and might produce material gains, it also has consequences that may not be so desirable. Our support of the will to knowledge, belief in autonomy, and economic care for self also entail the continuation of the very oppressive conditions the liberatory rhetoric of education hopes to ameliorate. Our very hopes for education and belief in our own autonomy induce subjectification: subjectification which, in our interiorization of it, primes us to accept other discourses of power through which academic discourse achieves its status as a valued cultural institution. As Elspeth Stuckey argues, “becoming literate signifies in large part the ability to conform or, at least, appear conformist” (19). This conformity is “violent” for Stuckey because it is conformity, through literacy, to a “society bent on unequal distribution of wealth and power. . . . Literacy is part and parcel a relationship that involves the vertical and horizontal exchanges of the means of livelihood in a literate society” (59). By willingly becoming subjects of this institutional discourse, we tacitly agree to the social conditions by which it maintains both effects of power: productive and repressive. If school is meritocratic, such a meritocracy only works when some fail to merit the material gain it would offer, when some do not enjoy the agency it promises within the social real. Imbricated as we may be in the cultural logic of schooling = economic success = care for self = care for society, we are also prepared to see those who do not “merit” such success as squandering their opportunities. Conditions of the social real that negatively impact the enactment of such equality are dismissed. Race, ethnicity, gender, class, sexuality—any of the categories by which we negotiate the minefield of twenty-first century identity politics—are negated in favor of the common opportunity provided for all citizens. When material concerns for power recede, individual agency explains inequities quite easily. The mechanisms by which a technology of self operates also, then, ensure the acceptance of a particular view of identity and delimit the options we see for constructing identity within current arrangements of power. While culture may offer a variety of conflicting positions, it also constructs desires for certain modes of being that can make only certain “choices” for identity constitution seem viable ones. Identifications with discourse are neither “temporary,” the literacy autobiographies tell us, nor are multiple options desirable. Rather, the desire to “suture” self with particular discourses is a material one, a drama played out in the social real where the playing field among discourses is never equal.

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interchapter three : The Imposter in Me

Once I had decided in high school that my main goal was to be “successful,” to leave the rampant unemployment in my neighborhood, my whole approach to schooling changed. I now saw school as the competitive arena it really was. I attempted, as much as possible, to mimic my classmates: all children from middle- and upper-class homes as is often the case in the “honors track.” I resisted my guidance counselor’s attempts to enroll me in secretarial classes, telling him over and over again that honors students did not take vocational courses. His reply: “it’s always good to have a backup since you probably won’t go to college.” I gave in but insisted on taking Latin and all the other electives my fellow honors students were taking. Tacked onto an academic track, then, came the typing and home economics courses that the rest of my honors cohort never had to take. In school contexts I now sought to hide whatever might mark me as different, whether it was my address, my jobs after school, or my shameful attendance in typing class. While I still occasionally poked at the boundaries—doing a book report on Janis Joplin’s autobiography or David Mamet’s American Buffalo because it had more curses than any play I’d ever seen—such attempts to work outside the boundaries of academic expectations were minor. I sought out teachers to work with on my writing, always characterized as too “informal.” I found myself imitating the texts I was reading. I dropped leisure reading of romance novels in favor of the Brontes and Jane Austen. I was learning, in short, how not to be me and to refashion myself in preparation for college. It is at this point that I began to live what I always think of as my “double life.” In high school, this emerged in my substance abuse with friends after school and on weekends, something I would allow myself to do as long as it didn’t lower my grades or harm my performance in school. After my suspension from school for drinking on school grounds (on a Wednesday morning!), it emerged in high participation in youth groups at the local Catholic church. Whatever way it manifested itself, my life in high school became a continual attempt to segregate my public life as an “A” student and active student leader from my private life of friends, family, and social activities. Socializing was the only space in which I could then (and sometimes now) engage in the activities,

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discourse, and values that seemed more true to self; I had, early on, learned the lesson that these aspects of self had no place in the public forums of school. As strange as this form of “double consciousness” felt, it seemed perfectly natural: it was and sometimes is the only way to “be” in the public world that ensured success. What was/is more painful were/are the times I slipp(ed), the times when a working-class subjectivity works itself into an academic realm unknowingly in an unexpected situation, reminding me of my difference. A few scenes: The shame of admitting publicly in an English class that I would not be attending Williams as I had hoped but Fitchburg State College, while my classmates, having already admitted to accepting offers from Harvard, MIT, and Radcliffe looked on pityingly. Working for hours in front of a mirror to try and remove all traces of my working-class Massachusetts accent in graduate school because my professors and friends commented too often how cute or quaint it was. An undergraduate professor’s comment that my paper lacked a certain “intelligent” style. The graduate class where we read Glynda Hull’s and Mike Rose’s essay, “This Wooden Shack Place: The Logic of an Unconventional Reading,” where I admitted in discussion that the working-class student’s misreading of images of poverty in a poem seemed more logical to me than the academic one that Hull and Rose assume to be self-evident to their readers. The literacy narrative I was assigned to write where I agonized about mentioning the illiteracy of close family members; I eventually “cut” any reference to home literacy altogether. A recent CCCC conference where a cab cut me and a colleague off, and the colleague’s shock at my reaction: a kick to the side of the cab and a quickly thrown middle finger. My body forgot to be middle-class and suburban. I am haunted, in particular, by a scene from the first year of my master’s program where I had to do an oral presentation on a project. Throughout the presentation on Marlowe’s use of techniques similar to absurdist dramatists, I referred to the ambivalence created within his plays toward characters, scenes, and reality itself. Yet rather than pronouncing the word “ambivalence” with a short “i” and “a,” I pronounced it ambee-vaylence, with a long “a” and “e.” The teacher’s correction of my pronunciation did not stick, only making me more and more nervous as my pale, redhead skin heated up to what I am sure was a deep apple blush. Leaving the classroom, I overheard two students talking, wondering “how she ever got into grad school.” How indeed! How does one cover up—and I did try desperately—that the ways of speaking, writing, and even thinking that seemed to come so naturally to others seemed almost beyond my grasp. The people I conversed with did not say words like “ambivalent;” how does one avoid being caught when one’s reading vocabulary so exceeds her speaking vocabulary? By refashioning herself as deliberately as possible. To this day, I check pronunciation with a colleague before even thinking of saying it aloud in a conference paper. In my master’s program, I enlisted the help of a friend to help me out at the library, having had no experience with any of the bibliographies

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(MLA, etc.) with which all my classmates were familiar. I asked friends to continually edit my written work so it would sound more academic. I deliberately sought out students who seemed successful, made alliances with them, and found myself copying their writing styles in an attempt to not let anyone in authority know how inadequate I was to this task I had set myself. With such attempts at mimicry, I successfully rewrote myself and my thinking. I know now, of course, that these ways of writing did not come naturally to any of my classmates, but it seems as if my mimicry took on a force much stronger than my peers’ because it extended beyond schooling to trying to revise eating habits, conversational patterns, the way I dressed, even how I decorated my apartment. Remarks like a friend’s casual comment that he had never met another doctoral student who had “so few books” in her house were taken to heart as I immediately began buying books at used book stores to make up for my inadequacies. I later took it so far as to display my CCCs and College Englishs in my living room. Even attempts at speaking difference, once I gained more confidence, were wrought with tension and seemed overly risky. I remember clearly how the students and professor reacted in a composition seminar when I attempted to present another cultural perspective on the connections between literacy and schooling. In response to many articles bemoaning the low literacy levels among the working class, I tried to discuss my father’s own advanced literacy, pointing out that he subscribed and read academic political science journals like Foreign Affairs. Not the literacy one expects from a high school drop-out. Similarly, I tried to discuss why illiteracy was not as disempowering as our readings made it sound by discussing the productive role in society of my “functionally illiterate” relatives who had complete ability to manage everyday life despite this illiteracy. My responses fell on deaf ears as we quickly moved onto analyzing why the readings’ perspectives were more generalizable than my experiences and, thus, more valuable. Most poignant is the American literature professor who authoritatively declared that “there is no working class that wants to identify itself in the U.S.” When I tried to explain that my own working-class experience told me that Americans do place value in this community, his reaction was to move on as if I had not spoken, teaching me perhaps most clearly the value of silencing this perspective. My lived experiences in another cultural scene were not considered a valuable source of knowledge in these contexts, so I stopped talking about these experiences. Instead, I began to think that they should be interpreted differently. Illiteracy was a social problem to be eradicated. The educational backgrounds of parents did negatively impact students’ literacy. The United States had no identifiable social classes. I was crazy to think that we did. As friends pointed out, I was living proof of the American dream; I was not working in an office or as a housewife raising hordes of children as my guidance counselor so long ago assumed I would. Commenting that I sometimes wondered if I would have even gone to college had I had a serious boyfriend in my senior year fell on deaf ears,

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so I stopped trying to explain myself as an anomaly of material circumstances rather than a result of my own effort and merit. I learned, that is, how clearly I needed to reinterpret or forget experiences that contradicted what I was learning. Female colleagues often speak of what we’ve come to call the “imposter syndrome.” I have this in spades. The unerring feeling that at any point I will slip up and someone will realize I don’t belong. Every administrative task, every meeting, every attempt at publication seems an opportunity to get caught. Securing a tenure-track job in a tight market, getting tenure, winning awards—none of these ostensible indicators of success has lessened the sense of being an outsider. When the feeling gets too strong, I run away, yet again, but this time to pool halls, to diners, to anyplace that feels comfortable—only to be reminded that I no longer fit there either. Even now, in the very moment of producing these words, it’s difficult to discuss my background. I’m breaking family rules and talking about money in a public forum, reporting experiences that should be hidden from all but the most intimate eyes. I’m admitting to the very source of my imposter syndrome, not entirely convinced, even in my secure, tenured job, that doing so won’t result in the end of the career I’ve come to enjoy so much. But at the same time I realize that it is only this security that allows me to speak. Earlier, the risk was too great; too real. Only the financially secure hybrid gets to speak; the rest of us are too scared of losing what little we’ve gained.

chapter four

Colonialism, Capitalism, and Composition: Structural Limitations on Composing Identities

I don’t feel like I am one of them. I want to feel like one of them. . . . I like reading books. But all the books are the same. I wish I could find other books. I read more books. I don’t want the prince to marry the princess. It’s not fair. I ask my mother why the prince always had to marry the princess. My mother says so they can live happily ever after. —Rajiv’s literacy autobiography The ‘unities’ which identities proclaim are, in fact, constructed within the play of power and exclusion, and are the result, not of a natural and inevitable or primordial totality but of the naturalized, overdetermined process of ‘closure.’ —Stuart Hall, “Who Needs Identity?” HOW EASILY THE PREMISES BEHIND public rhetorics on education, capitalist

desire, and academic discourse become aligned in the literacy autobiographies should greatly disturb compositionists concerned with the critical agency of our students to rewrite culture. Mired in economies by which the students seek to mark the body as cultural capital, desire for academic discourse’s identifications seemingly functions against the understanding of subjectivity on which so many of our critical and cultural pedagogies rely. While there most certainly are multiple options for identity construction available within academic and other cultural discourses, the literacy autobiographies ally academic discourse with some of the most oppressive options available. More important, their conflation of academic discourse with capitalist imperatives indicates that, at least in the case of this one institutional discourse, multiplicity does not seem to be a desired option. The function of capital in the autobiographies suggests, rather, a more structural power relationship wherein desire becomes orchestrated through ideologies of subject formation embedded in cultural institutions, much as Althusser posits in his concept of ideological state apparatuses. 105

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If the structural imposition of capitalist desire does function in concert with more poststructural options for multiple subjectivities, then how academic discourse participates in identity construction becomes a much more difficult question to answer than composition theory’s presumption of fluidity suggests. Instead, the connections between academic discourse and capitalist desire requires that we ask, yet again, the question Victor Villanueva has so consistently posed: Does academic discourse function within a postcolonial moment—highlighting the hybridity of the subject—or might it more accurately be conceived as a colonial discourse (“On”; “Maybe”)? In this chapter, I agree with Villanueva that academic discourse’s identity politics are more closely aligned with colonial discourses of identity construction than with the postcolonial promise of hybridity. I do not make such a contention lightly, but rather hope that such a strong statement might help compositionists scrutinize the ways in which capital and history are embedded in teaching academic discourse. In making such a claim, I attempt to take seriously both how America’s current racial relations are undoubtedly “a result of colonialism” (Villanueva, “On” 655), and the imperial force of capitalism under which such histories continue to manifest themselves in the need for competition and hierarchy. As Aijaz Ahmad has so consistently reminded postcolonial literary critics, the declaration of the postcolonial moment, and its reliance on the potential agency of the hybrid subject, may be premature. Assurances that we have moved into a history no longer characterized by structural forces ignores that, in a global context, “the post-colonial history of this so-called Third World is that each nation-state came under the dominance of a distinct national bourgeoisie (existing or emergent) as it emerged from the colonial crucible” (In Theory 16). Further, those most vociferous in touting the possibilities of the hybrid come “from the class, more often than not, which is the dominant class within that nation” (In Theory 12–13). From Ahmad’s point of view, the imperialism of capitalism is alive and well in the Third World, creating colonial power relations through the imposition of the global marketplace. Although I am not prepared to discard hybridity as a possibility extant in the United States, the historical relations that produced colonial forces are also alive and well in American society. I consider the postcolonial, then, in ways similar to Stuart Hall’s: not the “end of colonialism” but “after a certain kind of colonialism, after a certain moment of high imperialism and colonial occupation” that operates in the “shadow of it, inflected by it” (Drew, “Cultural” 189). Analogous to Ahmad’s more global argument, the literacy autobiographies’ immersion in capitalist desire suggests that hybridity might be a luxury afforded only those for whom the accumulation of capital is no longer a material need for agency (and, not incidentally, cultural currency). Although much more privileged than those with whom Ahmad is concerned, material status is something none of our students, just beginning to imagine themselves as part of this capitalist project, can necessarily assume—especially those marked by differences

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that already predispose them to exclusion from the success they pursue as they confront the material realities of our society where women make less money than men, Latino/as drop out of high school at a higher rate than any other group, gays and lesbians are denied the most basic civil rights to nondiscrimination in the workplace, and the social safety net is stripped away through regressive reforms. In Ahmad’s provocative terms, “postcoloniality is also, like most things, a matter of class” (“The Politics” 16). It is within such a view of capitalism—and the ways in which it is embedded in learning academic discourse—that we must consider composition’s identity politics. Through an examination of both the literacy autobiographies’ depictions of academic discourse and composition’s scholarship on identity, I argue that theory and pedagogy participate in a similar identity politic to that available in other cultural arenas. The teaching of composition does so by setting up a seemingly insurmountable self/Other relation more associated with colonialism than postcolonialism. To illustrate the potentially debilitating effects academic discourse might have on identity construction, then, I turn away from the poststructural and materialist theories I have been employing toward postcolonialism. Yet I turn not to the postcolonialism quickly gaining voice in composition, which focuses upon hybridity’s possibility for resisting ideology (e.g., Alexander; Jarratt, “Beside”), but instead to the postcolonial moment characterized by the hierarchization of identities imperialism conducts. I focus specifically on the identity hierarchies created by academic discourse’s association with capitalist success and how such connections limit the choices seemingly available to students for identity construction. Fixed identities may no longer be a viable concept at the dawn of the twenty-first century, but the concept’s deconstruction does not mean that “there’s just an open-ended horizon where we can just intentionally choose” among the subject positions culture offers us (Hall, qtd. Drew, “Cultural” 173). Rather, identity construction is continually limited by the discursive possibilities made available in the social real and the material hierarchies to which they are subjected, a process of circumscribing choices for identification in which academic discourse is deeply implicated. DISCURSIVE-MATERIAL RELATIONS OF POWER: IDENTIT Y RELATIONS IN POSTCOLONIALISM

Perhaps the greatest insight postcolonial theory offers my inquiry into academic discourse’s identity politics is its explanation of the central role juxtaposition plays in how identity is constructed. In these theories, identification with given subject positions is, as it was in Foucault, chiefly sought after in favor of one’s own agency and material gain in a care for the self. This care for self, however, does not operate in isolation. Instead, desire for particular identifications is also executed through an exclusionary practice of identity relations. Postcolonial theory

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elucidates such an exclusionary practice through the binary logic of self/Other. In a self/Other relation, we come to know ourselves, to construct ourselves (in a technology of self ) through how we perceive our identity as different than that of others in culture. The binary logic of self-identification suggests that identity construction seems predicated upon, yet again, the presumption of the autonomous, freestanding subject. Identities are marked and recognized through their exclusion of difference, through the creation of boundaries between a “me” and “them.” Such boundaries must be created, at their base, so that our assumptions of self-referential identity can be maintained. I cannot exist as an “I” unless I understand what I am not, unless I can believe that what makes me “me” is not what others are. In Hall’s provocative terms, identity is “a structured representation which only achieves its positive through the narrow eye of the negative. It has to go through the eye of the needle of the other before it can construct itself”(“Local” 21). While presumptions of autonomy may be discursively constructed, identities are also lived as if they were self-created and refer back only to the logic of the individual. What specific forms of difference are presented through which to construct a self/Other relation are thus also inextricably tied to power, domination, and history. As Homi Bhabha has argued so persuasively, the production of difference is never innocent; rather, the binary relations available for identity construction also point to how power differentiates in order to consolidate: “The exercise of colonialist authority . . . requires the production of differentiations, individuations, identity effects through which discriminatory practices can map out subject populations that are tarred with the visible and transparent mark of power” (Location 111). In any self/Other relation, Bhabha points out, the binary logic works to ensure that there is a transparency to one reference “that registers a certain obvious presence” (108), a presumption of normalcy and the “standard” by which the Other is contrasted. The Other is categorized and commodified to ensure the presence of the primary binary term. Difference becomes that which is visible or opaque, both ideologically (that which is recognized as departing from the “norm”) and physically through how we come to “read” the body’s relation to identity (the color of one’s skin, the sex of one’s body), while identities aligned with power remain transparent. The way this identity politic works is perhaps most clearly illustrated through the white/black binary in U.S. culture. Whiteness is rarely recognized as a race. Instead, race is typically understood as “other than white.” The phrase, “people of color,” seemingly functions as a clear referent, obscuring the premise by which it operates, that there are people “without color,” without race who need not be marked in such a way. Whiteness is known only in its juxtaposition to Otherness, not on its own terms. Thus, the binary logic by which identity is constructed in a self/Other relation functions to create “whiteness” as an invisible norm predicated upon a “politically constructed category parasitic on ‘Blackness’ ” (West, “New” 29). In this way, self/Other relations ensure the continual categorization of identities: We only know Blackness through whiteness, and whiteness only exists through Blackness. Such a dynamic is readily recognizable in the classroom when

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whiteness is discussed. Asking my students, for example, to describe what it means to be white in our culture inevitably leads to comparisons—what kinds of issues, like racial profiling, they need not worry about because they are white. Defining whiteness, without comparison to other races, seems almost impossible. This dynamic has long been recognized by feminism, going back to Simone de Beauvoir’s observation that the feminine is defined by the “not” masculine. Seeing identities so oppositionally, however, would be oversimplifying the matter. In postcolonial theory, identities are not in an oppositional relationship but a dialectical one. Instead of lacking definition—lacking presence through its opposition to a more primary term—each identity is predicated upon its difference from the Other. Self/Other relations are constitutive of both identities in a dynamic relation where each supplements the other. As such, each is necessary for the other to exist. Although false, the illusion of opposites works politically to separate groups, to mark groups as Other so that they can be deemed lesser, while ensuring that their mutual implication and dependence upon one another remains unrecognized. Cornel West clearly illustrates the blindness such a self/ Other relation creates through its seeming political efficacy: Hence, for liberals, black people are to be “included” and “integrated” into “our” society and culture, while for conservatives they are to be “well behaved” and “worthy of acceptance” by “our” way of life. Both fail to see that the presence and predicament of black people are neither additions to nor defections from American life, but rather constitutive elements of that life. (Race Matters, original emphasis, 6).

Because of this mutual relation, much postcolonial theory also focuses on the potential agency that lies in such a dynamic relation between self and Other. Since each is mutually dependent on the other, such a relation highlights how the colonized need not be silenced by imperial power in absolute terms. In a postcolonial culture, the binary nature of identity relations need not obliterate agency; rather, it sets the stage for new cultural forms to emerge. As the editors of the Post–Colonial Reader explain, in the self/Other relation lies great possibility for continual cultural change. In their summary, postcolonialism . . . lays emphasis on the survival even under the most potent oppression of the distinctive aspects of the culture of the oppressed, and shows how these become an integral part of the new formations which arise from the clash of cultures characteristic of imperialism. . . . it emphasizes how hybridity and the power it releases may well be seen to be the characteristic feature and contribution of the post-colonial, allowing a means of evading the replication of the binary categories of the past and developing new antimonolithic models of exchange and growth. (Ashcroft, Griffiths, Tiffin 193)

Such possibilities for agency and cultural change in the multiple subject are, of course, what draws so many compositionists to postcolonial theory, including myself.

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Yet it is equally important to focus on what the new terminology of “hybrid” implies about the fluidity of subjectivity. Discussing fluidity in terms of hybridity highlights not only possibilities for agency but also the relationship among multiple subjectivities and power as they emerge from historically more structural relations. Thus, the hybrid subject is related to, yet not synonymous with, the excess of postmodern versions of cultural studies and the sheer diversity of discourses that make up the contact zone and the public sphere. The hybrid is more similar to Hall’s concept of “new ethnicities.” Rather than a free play of discourses or the assurance that the subject will always exceed a given subject position, hybridity acknowledges that new forms of subjectivity—new ethnicities— emerge out of the old and, thus, in response to the racist and oppressive realities in which our previous understanding of ethnicity are implicated. This change in terminology recognizes how multiplicity emerges from specific historical relations of power and structural forms of identity imposed by imperialist forces. It offers us a way to historicize the categories of identity we have inherited—Black, Latino, White, Asian, Native, Man, Woman, Gay, Straight—as deliberate markings designed to separate groups in order to oppress one in favor of the other in the colonial moment. The term postcolonial implies we have exceeded that imperial history and moved to a more diversified set of power relations wherein the marked structural separation of the colonized from the colonizer has disappeared to a point where all identities have become hybrid: both colonized and colonizer include the Other within themselves. Gloria Anzaldua discusses this move in easily understandable terms wherein the distinction between nos and otras becomes nosotras: It used to be there was a “them” and an “us.” We were over here, we were the “other” with other lives, and the “nos” was the subject, the White man. And there was a very clear distinction. But as the decades have gone by, we, the colonized, the Chicano, the Blacks, the Natives in this country, have been reared in this frame of reference. We are complicitious for being in such close proximity and in such intimacy with the other. Now I think that “us” and “them” are interchangeable. Now there is no such thing as an “other.” The other is in you, the other is in me. (Lunsford, “Toward” 8).

By presuming hybridity lies in all subjects, theorists explain agency through metaphors of border crossings, where marginalized people reappropriate dominant discourses and convert them to alter power relations. However, this potential agency, it is essential to remember, is predicated not only on our ability to exceed self/Other relations in favor of hybridity, but also on the presence of such binaries as the inaugural moment where the colonial might move to the postcolonial. Binary identity relations precede hybridity—in fact, form the conditions of the hybrid’s possibility—but do not necessarily lead to hybridity.1 Rather, it is just as possible that difference remains embedded in structural power relations as it is that those structural relations will be exceeded

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by the border crosser. As such, discussions of hybridity that only emphasize its creative potential neglect many of the insights postcolonialism might offer if we are mindful of the relations from which the hybrid emerges: the structural identity binaries that precede this more creative agency, in fact constitute the very conditions that the “border crosser” needs to disrupt. The border crossing of the hybrid implies that borders are simultaneously being created within the same historical moment, borders that must be crossed to achieve cultural cross-fertilization. Most significantly, the hybrid emerges through internal colonialism as well as through more dynamic, mutually supporting relations: an aspect of hybridity that work in composition focused on the creative potential of the hybrid frequently occludes. Villanueva, in fact, argues that the term hybrid “lacks a punch” precisely because it can divert attention from the aspect of the hybrid that involves accommodating an oppressive system: “Hybridity can mean a creative transcendence, an affirmation of cultures and histories that are both of the mainstream and the other, but it also tends to include the cultural mimicry that the other is forced to undergo before creative transcendence is allowed expression” (“Maybe” 187). Forgetting the necessity of such mimicry can be found even in Anzaldua’s discussion of the hybrid’s potential. In Anzaldua’s interview with Andrea Lunsford, for example, she employs what Min-zhan Lu calls the “developmental plot” toward the radicalness of the hybrid’s expression. In her brief discussion of her own literacy history, Anzaldua contends that one needs to learn the dominant language before engaging in more hybrid forms of discourse, discussing her own current hybrid style as “trying to recover a childhood place where you code switch” (qtd. in Lu, “Vitality” 343). Lu highlights the internalized colonialism of such a comment well: “Given her personal educational history, Anzaldua literally ‘has to’ wait until English has devoured her ‘head’ and she ‘can’ (is allowed to) code switch again” (“Vitality” 343). What Lu underscores is the less palatable side of the hybrid: its formation within power relations wherein the internalization of the dominant precedes the hybrid’s creative agency. Before exceeding the self/Other relation from which the hybrid may emerge, subjectivity is formed through hierarchical identity relations that may very well still operate contemporaneously with more postcolonial relations. Such relations are as alive and well in the United States as they are in the Third World. If they were not, the scene of identity politics in the United States, which encourages, and indeed forces, us to discuss identity in the categorical terms of race, gender, and sexuality, would look much different. As citizens of the United States, we are encouraged to identify, in Gilyard’s terms, with a “primary” identity in just these categories and forced through media, institutions, laws, and social interactions to identify ourselves and others in these categories (see “Literacy”). Even in a potentially postcolonial society, identity rhetorics distinguish among identities as if they were separate and binary.

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In their study of inner-city youth, Shirley Brice Heath and Milbrey McLaughlin point out how difficult self-identifying as a hybrid can be in a culture designed to categorize identities: “Policy makers, educators, and youth workers often think first of strong ethnic identification as something that young people need or even demand. Yet . . . the voices of urban youth . . . contend that their embedded identities, or multilayered self-conceptions, represent far more than simple labels of ethnic or racial membership” (7). Such labels and categories, instead, are imposed by institutions as in Heath and McLaughlin’s example of middle-class Latinos who felt “pressured to self-identify as ‘culturally different’ only on college campuses or as ‘ethnic minorities’ for other purposes” (18). Local experiences may be multilayered but experience is also structurally categorized, in this instance, by institutions. While many theorists focus on the “performative” nature of race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality, material forces often operate to fix such performances within bodies. Seemingly indicative of unstable power relations, new structural relations formulated on the basis of multiple identities simply come to work less visibly. Jamie Mejia, in “Tejano Arts of the U.S.– Mexico Contact Zone,” illustrates the difficulties caused by postcolonialism extremely well by pointing to the disruption of both the assimilation model and the integrity of ethnic communities in a post-Fordist culture. In his words, “the modernist process of assimilation the dominant group has imposed on ethnic minorities ironically no longer holds (as it was originally intended to under a Fordist economy). At the same time, the autonomy of marginalized ethnic groups has apparently been dispersed by post-Fordist, transnational economic forces” (131). Forming identity among such fragmentation of previously stable identifications leads to what Mejia terms a “new vocationalism,” where market forces restratify identities even within such seeming diversity. No longer a clear mode of assimilation to the dominant group, hierarchies emerge in the terms of work, market, and employment. Transparent identities—associated with capital—still function in a self/Other relation, while at the same time such a focus on meritocracy and diversity fraudulently points to hybridity rather than structural power relations. How structural relations interfere with the hybrid’s potential is most obvious when we consider reactions to hybridity moving in the other direction: from self toward Other. One of the clearest examples of this move is the recent association of white suburban youth with hip-hop and rap who have taken to calling themselves “whiggers.” Such self-naming has led to diverse reactions on many fronts: from parents concerned with the ostensibly Black identifications of their white children; from the Black community, concerned about privileged white children reappropriating Black experience through mass media; from the mass media itself disturbed by cross-fertilization. Hybridity, it would seem, is acceptable when it includes the marginal moving toward the dominant (e.g., the “successful minority”), but not when it includes the dominant moving toward the marginal. While such movement may represent a dislocation of power, it also

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undercuts the authenticity of experience and communality on which marginal groups rely for self-identification in a culture that seeks to erase such identities. If anyone can claim any identity, discussions of very real racial oppression become much more difficult. Will self-identified “whiggers” also give up their claims to privilege? Change schools? Give up their trust funds? Become subject to racial profiling? In all these examples, new self/Other relations are formed through institutional discourses (Heath and McLaughlin), capitalist processes (Mejia), and the failure of the hybrid to exceed a body politic (whiggers). Hybridity is indeed possible, but just as often the flow of subjectivity is literally “stopped” by structural forms of power from which our culture has yet to extricate itself. Such extrication is so difficult because of the almost commonsensical link history has encouraged between body and race, easily hiding how race was socially constructed within colonial relations and capitalist processes. Racist discourses, as many postcolonial critics have argued, emerged in conjunction with economic and material factors: dehumanizing a group precedes the ability to forcibly demand and enslave its people for labor and exploit their land for raw materials. While racial stereotyping frequently precedes such exploitation (typically in accordance with religious and scientific ideologies), the relationship between the two is more accurately a dialectical one, “with racial assumptions arising out of and structuring economic exploitation” (Loomba 113). If one can imagine a group as “less human,” capitalist exploitation becomes all that much easier to justify. In turn, the status of a people as “capital” seemingly rationalizes continuing racism. The failure of humanist rhetorics to abolish slavery in the United States because of its integral relation to economic systems is an apt case on point. The ideology of racial superiority translates all too easily into class terms. As Ania Loomba argues, the convergence of economic and racial discourses led to the assumption that “certain sections of people were thus racially identified as the natural working classes” (126). Capitalism’s need for workers relies upon a readily available source of inexpensive, and exploitable, labor. This labor pool, throughout U.S. history, has been provided through slavery, immigration, and the continual underpaying of women. To assert that the rhetorics aligning body with gender and sexuality are also implicated in continuing capitalist processes, then, does not seem like much of a reach.2 Such arguments serve not merely as a history lesson; they also highlight how intimately tied to capitalist processes are the social constructions of identity that continue to operate in our present historical moment. Mejia’s analysis is central here: Although fragmentation of unified communities may mark the dawn of the twenty-first century, capitalist processes and meritocratic rhetorics are ready to take their place in a move from direct colonialism to imperialism. Global capital, as Hall has argued, does not function to homogenize all into a single identity as it may have in earlier versions of capitalism; it does not seek to obliterate local capital, government, or community; instead, “it operates through

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them” (“Local” 28). It uses difference and diversity to its own ends, simultaneously maintaining identity differences while it employs them to sustain a competitive system and to market difference as consumptive practice (e.g., exotic foods, etc.). To do so, capitalist processes must produce difference in hierarchical relations even as its consumptive practices seemingly encourage the breakdown of such binaries. Deepika Bahri’s caution that hybridity is not easily constructed, despite examples all around us, is an important one here. To presume hybridity is to ignore “the scores of underclass immigrants in Anglo-America and illegal bordercrossers” who “cannot ‘make themselves comfortable’ with the same ease that other postcolonials have but also know that border-crossing can be dangerous and potentially fatal” (39). Presuming hybridity, in short, is to ignore the material conditions in which too many of our fellow citizens live, unable to access the relative freedom capital might provide—to ignore “the deeply racial and class segregated nature of our cities” that “should also alert us to the intransigent borders within, rather than the more glamorous cultural borders that metropolitan postcolonial celebrities invoke” (39). Borders are both real and discursive; border crossing is physically threatening and materially disenfranchising. Hybridity is a laudable goal but not one easily achieved. SELF/OTHER RELATIONS IN ACADEMIC DISCOURSE: MAINTAINING TRANSPARENCY

Although the U.S. cannot be considered a postcolonial society by strict definition, its history is imbued with colonial forces—slavery, segregation, reservations, legal definitions of women as property, institutionalized discrimination against gays and lesbians. There are multiple examples of colonizing power in our history. These forces remain ingrained in the very fabric of society: in its economies, its institutions, the media, and the public consciousness. The key question for composition becomes, then, whether our pedagogies and theories can be linked to attempts at colonization. In particular, do we participate in the inscription of a “transparent” subjectivity through which structural power relations operate to instantiate borders or do we encourage the border crossing potential of the hybrid? On this question, Lu’s reading of Anzaldua becomes extremely provocative, suggesting that academic discourse may be more associated with forms of cultural mimicry and internalized colonialism than it is with the postcolonial hybrid’s possibilities for agency. Given the central role that the academic institution plays in assuring the meritocracy on which capitalism relies, the likelihood that academic discourse also participates in maintaining self/Other relations is all too real. If academic discourse does function as a colonial discourse that produces self/Other relations, then it would be aligned with structural forces in our culture. Arguably, the most structural force functioning in U.S. culture is capital-

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ism. In fact, it is America’s role in global capitalism that allows us to discuss American imperialism despite the lack of a direct, international colonizing force. In this way, America becomes a colonizing power without ever having to directly occupy the colonized country. If we follow Marxist thinking on the distinction between precapitalist and capitalist colonialism, then the key distinction becomes not a country conquered nor direct political control but the restructuring of economies in line with the imperialist’s (Loomba 3–10). The effects of global imperialism, however, should not be viewed only through the lens of America’s relationship with other countries; it also includes the relations imposed upon its own citizens. While the U.S. citizenry benefits greatly from global capitalism, we are also subject to capitalist imperatives and consumptive practices, no matter how we might try to avoid them. If colonization can be associated with the structural force of capitalism in U.S. society, as I think it can, then composition does seem complicit in maintaining self/Other relations wherein transparent identities become associated with class and market forces. The connection between academic discourse and capitalism in the literacy autobiographies, for example, suggests that the identities one forms in academic discourse may function as precisely the kind of transparency Bhabha situates in the self/Other relation. As a means to social and material success in our society, academic discourse appears to be the “great equalizer,” offering all the opportunity to construct identity in its parameters with no deleterious effects. Its status as the discourse of freedom and class mobility helps create the appearance of neutrality. By the logic of chapter 3 wherein schooling = economic success = care for self = care for society, it should not be surprising that the literacy autobiographies characterize schooled language as transparent and neutral. While academic discourse may prescribe routes to economic success, the discourse itself is not seen as raced, classed, gendered, or sexed. Identifications with academic discourse, as a result, seem to offer a nonidentity position connected only with power rather than identity politics: the precise transparency of self that characterizes a self/Other relation. Most disturbing, however, is that the literacy autobiographies are not alone in suggesting such a transparency. Composition scholarship similarly disconnects identity from capital, ensuring the identities capital tries to inscribe remain transparent. In our discussions of discourse communities, for example, it is almost always the “other” communities that are linked to race, gender, class, and sexuality. Academic discourse is characterized only as an institutional discourse, albeit one connected to “the discourse of power.” Academic discourse may suggest identity choices, but these choices are linked only to financial advantage, while home discourses are explicitly linked to identity categories. Within such communitybased rhetorics, the student is seemingly given the choice over which communities she will enter and how such entry might affect relations to “other” communities. In such formulations, the student’s desires, individually determined, give her control over how immersion in discourse will ultimately affect

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identity formation. As Bizzell puts it, “there is grounds for hope that the student who masters the academic worldview will . . . wish to preserve his other ties to the home community” (“What” 300, my emphasis). Bizzell asks “what is to prevent academically successful students from going on simply to secure their financial advantage, forgetting about their home communities?” (300). The “choice” is simply whether to retain other subjectivities within that identity formation. By not being marked as an identity or even associated with its own race and class, academic discourse remains so transparent as to indicate a “nonchoice” and thus, presumably, a “nonidentity” even while it may impact others. As Bizzell herself has commented, these early positions—still widely influential in classrooms across the country—presume that teaching academic discourse did not offer “direct instruction in values . . . but rather simply” offered students “the value-neutral tool of academic discourse” (Academic 283). The implication behind such “neutrality,” as Bizzell now readily admits, is a class-based one where social justice seems served by “the aftereffects or outcomes of my classroom work (through the academic success of previously disenfranchised students, for example)” (Academic 284). Academic discourse provides access to power via economic changes in such a scenario with seemingly little impact on identity. In such discussions, the very term “academic discourse” also serves to deflect attention from its associations with capitalism. Calling it the discourse of power suggests a connection to the hierarchies in our culture, accessed through better employment opportunities and/or greater success within other college classes. Similar to the more overt colonial relations described by postcolonial critics, however, composition rarely acknowledges these links directly. Very few pieces (e.g., Smith, Bloom, Delpit) appear in our journals even admitting to composition’s function in the economic sphere, never mind arguing in favor of this function. Similarly, despite composition’s forays into a diversity of cultural and critical theories over the last two decades, very few explore how Marxist theory, beyond applications of Freire, might inform composition’s work (Bizzell, “Marxist”; Ohmann; Myers; Horner, Terms). Finally, the issue of class as lived experience of difference—something that would inevitably highlight the “power” behind the discourse—is addressed only sparingly in case studies (Brodkey, “Literacy”; Fox; Seitz). Instead, our discussions of difference, like those in the public sphere, ignore class in favor of the categories with which we are all so familiar: race, gender, and sexuality. Composition may include “class” always within its list of the “holy four” of identity politics, but the experience of class is noticeably absent. Equally notable is how composition occludes structural economic forces from its discussions of identity politics. As Catherine Chaput has recently argued most “pedagogies analyze race, gender, sexuality and class as separate and autonomous forces rather than as part of a broader process that unites and integrates all these forms of systemic oppression” (43). Within a discourse community rhetoric suggesting borders to identity; contact zone rhetorics that allow for “safe houses;” and cultural studies rhetorics focused on the fluid, constantly changing

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subject, identities either remain separated, or are constantly in flux, never engaged in a systemic relationship that would suggest a structural force. Very few in composition go so far as to suggest that our scholarship should look more closely at these connections. Even those who do either cannot follow up on this desire or are stymied by the direction of the field. Witness Gilyard’s preface to Race, Rhetoric, and Composition where he admits to initially wanting to “demand that the contributors to this volume take a hard materialist turn and link race explicitly to the historical formations of racism and economic exploitation” (ix). Yet he was, for reasons not given, unable to do so. Rather, he explains, “I realized (sensibly so I trust) that this ‘race thing’ is ever shifting, ever changing, and becoming increasingly complex” (ix). I agree with Gilyard’s “sense” in recognizing the complexity of the issue but have to wonder whether, should he have pursued his demand, a collection could even have been made. As compositionists, after all, we too are immersed deeply in academic discourse and as likely to be subject to the transparent identities it proffers as our students. The colonizer rarely is interpellated in such a way that he might be able to discuss explicitly his (our?) function. Rather, in the case of my own teaching, hiding behind the phrases I so often hear myself use with my students, “discourse of power,” “dialect of business,” or the most embarrassing justification of all, “you’ll need this in your other college courses,” allows me to participate in the meritocracy while ostensibly maintaining my goals of diversity education and teaching for critical agency. Somehow acknowledging the power of the discourse seems enough. Despite the critique I forge wholeheartedly with my students against capitalism in public rhetorics, I rarely help them explore my own classroom’s implication in capital. Given the absence of class, capitalism, and economics in composition, I have a feeling I’m not alone. Like the teachers in Brodkey’s well-known study with the literacy letters, it seems that educational discourse must be “frenetically protected . . . from class” (139) lest composition teachers and scholars begin to recognize our role in perpetuating as well as ameliorating class relations. Or, even worse, connecting economics to the identity politics of race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality that we so desperately attempt to alter through our pedagogies. Acknowledging such connections would not only make our implication in capitalism more apparent; it might lead to questioning how capital produces identity difference to maintain the status quo. Instead, we neglect our role in capital and the routes to power it prescribes, deflecting attention from our prominent role in offering “transparent” spaces for discursive identification. DIVERSIT Y, DIFFERENCE, AND ESSENTIALISM: CATEGORIZING IDENTITY

Although compositionists may help perpetuate the transparent identities academic discourse offers its subjects in regards to capital, more recent work on academic discourse’s identity politics goes a long way toward highlighting the discourse’s implication in supporting transparent identities related to race, gender,

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and sexuality. In this way, composition has engaged in a serious analysis of the self/Other relation our own work implicitly supports. Yet composition is not completely absented from further supporting such self/Other relations even in our attempts to call attention to them. While it certainly can never be said that composition has failed to attend to difference, how we have discussed such issues are extremely problematic when viewed through a postcolonial lens. Composition scholarship has succeeded in naming the self/Other relation but not in deconstructing the binary by which its discourse remains associated with the transparent identities of power: whiteness, heterosexuality, and masculinity. As a result, the identities proffered through academic discourse are made visible, but its discourse’s immersion in capital’s transparency also reproduces a differential understanding of identity. Our discussions do this in two ways: (1) by forging critiques of academic discourse on the basis on a singular categorical identity (e.g., feminine/masculine, straight/gay, Black/white), maintaining the binaries between those identities, and (2) by failing to connect identity to both body and discourse, suggesting a distinction between how identity is forged and how it is lived. In the first instance, difference is continually highlighted such that we maintain the categorical nature of identity rhetorics in the public sphere, preserving the categories of race, gender, and sexuality as sacrosanct. In making these distinctions, compositionists not only accept such categories but also discuss them as seemingly unconnected to one another, ensuring the perpetuation of a self/Other identity politics. Similarly, by focusing overly much on discursive interventions, composition suggests that identity politics can be exceeded without reference to the body’s role in discursive-material relations. Conversely, when we focus only on material concerns, academic discourse—as an issue of textuality—remains transparent, deflecting any critique such material concerns might forge against it. Let me take feminism, perhaps the critical approach most successful in its attempt to highlight the transparent identities operating within academic discourse, as a case in point. Feminist composition scholars have successfully demonstrated that academic discourse is training in patriarchal modes of thinking and speaking (e.g., Flynn; Bleich; Kraemer; Cayton) and altered pedagogy to include more “feminine” genres (e.g., Lamb), yet such arguments are typically made on behalf of women students and equity for women. In this way, body becomes linked to discourse, but in an essentialist way that favors one body over another. Further, only certain bodies are “counted” in such an argument, as the diversity of women’s experience inflected by race and class are rarely highlighted with few exceptions (e.g., Royster, Traces; Brodkey, “Literacy”). Significantly, such arguments based in the woman’s body associate the feminine with issues of equity in a patriarchal system, not a critique of the system itself nor how patriarchy may be linked to capital. In this way, feminist arguments maintain a separation of identity categories, and further, preserve the transparency of academic discourse’s invitation to power and success through its discourse. By

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operating within self/Other binaries even as it seeks to highlight them, feminist arguments succeed in naming the binary but not in transgressing it. The transparent identity—masculine—is only added to, ensuring its viability as an identity category. Further, the capitalist processes that benefit from the production of such differences are left transparent. I do not want to demean the advances in composition feminism has encouraged. I have not only engaged in such work myself but have benefited greatly from the work of others. Why such seemingly progressive approaches ultimately fail to produce social change, however, must be interrogated. The problem lies in the rhetorics of diversity they employ. Despite its seeming efficacy, the production of difference does not operate solely in the service of equality. In a typical Foucauldian twist, diversity arguments can be seen as both productive and oppressive. From a postcolonial perspective, categorizing identities might best be seen as a reproduction of force under a new rubric functioning to ostensibly offer agency and ensure that power remain with the colonizing body. As Bhabha puts it: From this point of view, discursive ‘transparency’ is best read in the photographic sense in which a transparency is also always a negative, processed into visibility through the technologies of reversal, enlargement, lighting, editing, projection, not a source but a re-source of light. Such a bringing to light is a question of the provision of visibility as a capacity, a strategy, an agency. (Location 110)

Visibility brings with it a form of agency, a form of productive power, but its representation also ensures differences remain marked. Through self/Other relations, diverse identities are not only recognized (a form of political power), but also marked and categorized in ways that ensure the transparency of a “normal,” unmarked identity (the continuation of dominant power relations). As in feminist “advances” in composition, the sustained production of difference ensures both seeming gains in identity politics and the endurance of identity hierarchies. Concurrent with multiple options for identity construction—for new hybrids to emerge—are the structural ways in which that creative potential might also function hegemonically. Hall makes this point quite clearly: “Hegemony is not the disappearance or destruction of difference. It is the construction of a collective will through difference. It is the articulation of differences which do not disappear” (“Old” 58). Herein lies the conundrum: Recognizing difference seemingly supports diversity, and through diversity, equality, while at the same time laying the groundwork for the execution of power based in categorical identities presumed to be authentically related to cultural experience. By marking difference, we also come to essentialize it, and essentialize it in such a way that self/ Other relations remain inviolate, orchestrating unequal power relations, even as we seek to ameliorate the same. Identity categories quickly become a natural

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way to think of groups and/or represent cultural diversity in ways “true” to such groupings’ authentic production of ethnicity, gender, and sexuality. It is also the presumption of the “real” nature of such categories within the social that obscures their discursivity and historicity. Obscuring such strategies by which identities are produced, however, is one of the ways they serve as such effective tactics of power. The complex relations initiated by recognizing difference as a route to both agency and unequal power relations is aptly illustrated in the link between identity politics and meritocracy that so deeply inflects education. Meritocracy, as we’ve seen, functions to recreate the transparency of self/Other relations. How the body sign-ifies in the social real, that is, involves the assumption that bodies not only indicate appropriate relations to capital but to identity itself. Bodies that signify capital are seen to be unmarked, as associated only with the social “good,” and thus not identities at all because the individual they mark is seen to exceed categorization in a collectivity. The movement toward identification with academic discourse’s subject positions is a movement toward transparency, toward a nonidentity presumably not impacted by body. Further, such nonidentities function to continually indicate those who do not sign-ify correctly, to recreate the very categories by which we come to understand identity itself. Exceeding the categorical nature of identity, as a result, can only be accomplished by an individual. The individual moves across the binary via social success and equal opportunity, while those who do not remain mired in inevitable comparisons and categorical identities. Yet, such a politic also works to ensure even those who have achieved meritocratic success are continually marked as well. Since the collectivity is presumed to subsume the entire group, the mark of difference on the physical body invokes that collectivity. Thus, even through meritocracy (or more accurately, as a result of its function to mark difference in collectivities), the “successful minority” is seen as an individual in capital relations (i.e., the one who merits advancement), while physically invoking the collectivity that ensures the perpetuation of difference. In the never-ending cycle of identity politics, those who achieve in the terms of the dominant participate in creating differential relations through the seeming “example” they set of the meritocracy’s viability, ironically ensuring the very difference meritocracy is meant to ameliorate becomes even more fixed as a collective difference inhabited by bodies marked in historically specific categories. In these ways, power works to ensure discriminatory effects within an equalizing rhetoric that seemingly proffers transparent identities to all bodies while simultaneously ensuring differences are continually produced. This seemingly inescapable logic functions at all levels of society—in our public rhetorics of identity, in the media, in political arrangements, and our own pedagogies and theories of writing. Participatory politics ensnared in representations marked by such categories, for example, illustrate how easily liberal politics of diversity (redistricting of Congressional seats; affirmative action; Caucuses

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organized by race, gender, and sexuality, etc.) might be seen to function in favor of a continual production of difference. Colonial authority requires modes of discrimination (cultural, racial, administrative . . . ) that disallow a stable unitary assumption of collectivity. The “part” (which must be the colonialist foreign body) must be representative of the “whole” (conquered country), but the right of representation is based on its radical difference. Such double think is made viable only through the strategy of disavowal just described, which requires a theory of the ‘hybridization’ of discourse and power that is ignored by theories who engage in a battle for ‘power’ but do so only as the purists of difference. (Bhabha, Location 111)

By this analysis, the production of difference, even as it results in very real social change, also functions to create the very conditions by which groups are discriminated against in the absence of direct physical force. Such a politic continually reformulates self/Other relations such that dominant identity categories go unnamed and unchallenged. As Lawrence Grossberg suggests, “what constitutes such a politics is the assumption of a self-defined constituency acting in the interests (or politics) of that definition. Within such constituencies, every individual is a representative of the totality. But in fact, such constituencies do not and need not exist, except as the work of power—or of articulation” (87). Neither Grossberg nor Bhabha is eschewing a politics of identity or dismissing the significant advances made in collective politics over the past decades such as the feminist gains in composition that have, undoubtedly, altered pedagogy. Instead, they attempt to call our attention to how the construction of difference is deeply embedded in power relations. While a collective politics of difference was a necessary corrective in the U.S. to the presumption of “equal humanity,” which was conferred only to certain identities, Bhabha would encourage us to distinguish between the functions of diversity in its liberal humanist tendencies and the power relations that are recreated through more insidious rhetorics of difference. This distinction between diversity and difference is a crucial one. Diversity suggests equality; difference highlights comparative and structural relations. “If cultural diversity is a category of comparative ethics, aesthetics, or ethnology, cultural difference is a process of signification through which statements of culture or on culture differentiate, discriminate, and authorize the production of fields of force, reference, applicability, and capacity” (“Cultural” 206). Cultural identities are problematic precisely when they become categorical, when hybridity becomes “the sign of the productivity of colonial power” producing “discriminatory identities that secure the ‘pure’ and original identity of authority” (Location 112). Through such categorical understandings, for example, the “masculinity” of academic discourse can only be realized by its contrast to femininity: to the feminine discursive forms linked to the Other body. As such, composition’s

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material intervention necessarily rests with recommending the “addition” of feminine genres rather than investigating the intersections and mutual implications of the masculine and feminine. Transparency is named but unchallenged. Academic genres and discursive strategies are recognized as masculinist but remain unchanged, secure in their “original identity of authority.” Hybridity is, indeed, possible and some arguments point in these directions (e.g., Jarratt, “Beside”; Haswell and Haswell), but transcendence has not yet been achieved. In this way, even with the best of intentions to alter material conditions, interventions relying on diversity rhetorics can function to sustain the very power relations they seek to change because they impel us to focus on the “other” as a way of initiating social change. Yet such a focus also allows the power of the primary term to remain secure. Difference proliferates, while transparency remains unexamined. As Ross Chambers argues in reference to whiteness, the transparent term in any self/Other relationship is recognizable not only by its invisibility but also by its indivisibility: Whiteness is not itself comparable with anything, but other things are compared unfavorably with it, and their own comparability with one another derives from their distance from the touchstone. In other words, the unmarked or “blank” categories are aparadigmatic. Only the marked categories form part of the paradigm and may therefore be compared with one another. As a result, the marked categories’ relation to the unmarked ones that define their paradigmaticity is that of a plural (having the characteristic of comparability) to a singular (having the characteristic of uncomparability). . . . Thus, gay men are “like women”; Asians are “better immigrants” than Latinos. . . . (189)

If self/Other relations are accepted, transparent identities may be named, but not interrogated. Only difference can be examined, put under scrutiny. Transparency is visible only through this “double-vision,” by what we might highlight when examining the Other. The interpretative lens is difficult, after all, to apply to something that hides so well. Composition’s treatment of sexuality makes this relationship between the examined and unexamined even more apparent. Still relatively absent in composition scholarship, sexual orientation, when it is discussed, emerges primarily as an issue of material rather than discursive relations: a question of position for teachers and students—“to come out or not come out”—as well as the threat posed by the content proscribed in academic writing, especially personal writing assignments (e.g., Sloane; Elliott). The question of what to reveal and not to reveal are central ones in a society where physical violence against gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered (glbt) bodies occurs all too often and discrimination is legally sanctioned. Composition’s discussions of sexuality, quite logically then, focus almost exclusively on the material conditions imposed upon difference. As a result, when questions about schooled writing arise, our concerns rest with

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textual content as in Harriet Malinowitz’s examples from her composition sections focused explicitly on glbt issues. Accepting the categorical identities so necessary to material work, however, limits our ability to interrogate discursive transparency. For example, Malinowitz also points to the heterosexual identity inscribed by academic discourse, and thus begins the difficult task of highlighting the transparent identities within academic discourse. Yet articulating this transparency tends to follow the logic of comparability so indicative of self/Other relations. While Malinowitz argues vociferously for associating academic discourse with such an identity, she—in accordance with the overwhelmingly transparent identity of heterosexuality in our culture—is forced to describe only what is excluded (the Other), while naming the transparent (self). Heterosexuality remains singular, a blank category that can only be named. How many of us, for example, could answer the question Malinowitz’s work implies: How has my academic writing been influenced by my sexuality? When teaching her book with a group of writing teachers, only the one “out” gay man in my graduate class could answer this question. The other students, presumably straight, had little to say. The indivisibility and indescribability of the transparent identity is in no way more easily tested. While composition scholarship may recognize that academic discourse is associated with straight identities, we have yet to describe these heterosexual subject positions in the ways feminist scholars have succeeded with the masculinist nature of academic textuality. Composition has succeeded in naming but not describing; transparency remains intact; heterosexuality’s indivisiblilty endures. Even the naming has been long in coming in scholarship on race, but for precisely the opposite reason. Because composition’s work on race has focused for so long only on the discursive, it has ignored the material. Although there has been a great deal of research on race as it relates to language diversity, the implication that such questions might also be linked to racism or material concerns has taken much longer. It is exceedingly difficult, after all, to even name something that hides so well: the possibility that academic discourse itself might be implicated in race relations. Instead, race becomes linked in most composition research to discourse—a certain dialect, language, or rhetorical style—but rarely to body (see Prendergast). Apparently, discourse can be raced, but our students are not. It is as if they existed in a “color blind” classroom somehow separate from the identity politics located in the body that functions throughout the rest of society. As Villanueva puts it so well, “it seems that we’ve danced around racism in this business, speaking more often of multiculturalism. We seem to hang onto the old idea of cultural pluralism that sounds nice until one remembers its use in the 1960s to justify the melting pot mentality . . . and its concomitant, the bootstraps mentality (“Reading” 195). Villanueva reminds us here that pluralism and multiculturalism frequently function as the “absence” of race in favor of meritocracy (i.e., the bootstrap mentality). By divorcing discourse from the body, we avoid race in favor of discursive diversity, occluding structural

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power relations in favor of multiplicity. Once we enter the level of multiple literacies, acknowledging all as viable seemingly releases us from any obligation to deal with racism or capital’s role in race relations. The well-intentioned focus on diversity, in sum, deflects attention from questions of difference, from how academic discourse itself might be implicated in the very oppressive realities our diversity work seeks to alter. The absence of race in composition studies—as something other than cultural pluralism—also allows composition, as some scholars are beginning to recognize, to ignore the racial identity of academic discourse itself (e.g., Barnett; Keating; Marshall and Ryden). That is, its whiteness. While composition has continually examined how discursive difference is marginalized, academic discourse’s ability to set up such a border has only recently suggested that the discourse itself may be raced, and thus complicit in race relations. Yet one need only attempt to think of studies involving white students wherein their race is noted, or of white students other than those marked by difference in some other way—class, rural communities—to highlight how clearly the “successful” writer of academic discourse is already presumed to be white. When successful students are discussed in composition scholarship, the discussion invokes the generalized term of “the student,” a person “absent of a specific ethnic or gendered referent” (Helmer 11). Jacqueline Royster and Jean Williams help extend this observation to its implicit identity politics: “While this seemingly neutral approach could be thought of as placing all students on an equal level, the neutrality often erases the presence of students of color with the resultant assumption that, in not being marked as present, they in fact were not there” (568). This link of white bodies to “successful” writers is further encouraged by how the scholarship discusses less successful writers. Although basic writers may certainly be white, research suggests that students of color are always basic writers. By continually positioning students of color as “seeking a way into an academic culture to which they presumably have no traditional moorings,” scholarship conflates “ethnicity, otherness, and basic writing . . . despite the extent to which these connections are not automatic” (Royster and Williams 570). In the terms I have been using, identities lacking a referent imply transparency, and the transparent identity in U.S. culture, as we all know too well, is white. In focusing so much attention on the difference of those racially marked in the public sphere, composition similarly recreates the self/Other binary wherein attention—the ability to study, to analyze, to be seen as multiple and comparable—remains with the Other, while the transparent—whiteness—is seemingly aparadigmatic and indivisible. As a result, examining race only within discursive terms allows us to disconnect it from material relations, specifically the structural relations of capital in which academic discourse’s transparency resides. As Ann Louise Keating argues via Kobena Mercer, to neglect whiteness as an identity is to neglect, yet again, the imperialism of capital: “. . .‘whiteness’ and its ‘violent denial of difference’ serve a vital function in masking social and economic inequalities in contempo-

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rary western cultures” (902). “By negating those people—whatever the color of their skin—who do not measure up to ‘white’ standards, ‘whiteness’ has played a central role in maintaining and naturalizing a hierarchical social system and a dominant/subordinate worldview” (902). Just as central to the racial identity of academic discourse, then, is its association with power. Whiteness, as a way of being, is inextricably associated with capital and class in our society; if it were not, the label of Oreo (or apple, or banana, or Twinkie) would not be so commonly issued to middle-class people of color. In this way, composition’s identity politics mirrors much of our public rhetorics of identity. Our scholarship frequently disconnects discourse from body as in the treatment of race and class, suggesting that such identities are reducible to discourse alone, and, as a result, the bodies that issue such discourses are not subject to material forms of oppression. When body becomes an issue, as with sexuality and gender, it is presumed to be authentically written, thus body becomes indicative of lived experience separate from the material and discursive realities in which that experience was forged. Discursive and material forces are rarely seen as interacting to produce identities that may exist in an unequal power relationship with academic discourse precisely because of how they are located in the social real. By focusing primarily on the discursive, while presuming body only indicates a link to an authentic cultural experience, composition’s identity work replicates the public assumptions that difference matters only as an issue of meritocracy (gaining access to the discourse of power) or is authentically linked to body in ways that ensure only particular bodies can speak to experiences of race, class, and sexuality. Yet it is precisely such categorization and binary logics of identity that ensure discriminatory effects of power. If identity is formed in self/Other relations, then identities are formed in differential relations, creating hierarchies with significant material consequences. Identities may be constructed discursively, resulting from rhetorical interventions into historically specific conditions, but they are lived within relations to other bodies and structures of power that constantly subject such self/Other relations to oppressive material conditions. Composition would do well to attend to McLaren’s caution that “. . . structural relations of power must not be ignored. The concept of totality must not be abandoned but rather seen as an overdetermined structure of difference. Differences are always differences in relation, they are never simply free-floating” (Predatory 131). In any binary relation, a “lesser” term emerges. The material effects of occupying the lesser term are significant—poverty, racism, sexism, homophobia—the discriminatory effects produced by a differential relation of identity that is constructed to produce a transparency—a seeming nonidentity—associated with those in power. Even in his argument for seeing race as socially constructed, Gilyard provides a provocative reminder of the material effects of our rhetorics of identity: “Although I have posited that race is rhetorical, I have not suggested that it is merely so . . . I, for one, have always known the law: If

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the gun is empty, I still get the armed-robbery charge, even if I’m armed only with rhetorical bullets” (“Higher” 51). FROM THEORY TO PRACTICE: COMPOSITION’S IDENTIT Y POLITICS IN THE CL ASSROOM

I emphasize the discursive-material interaction of identity politics to remind us of the consequences of composition’s work. Discursive work is identity work. Maintaining self/Other relations—replete with the rhetorical categories by which identity is understood in the public sphere—has significant material consequences for how our students live their lives and imagine their potential. How we depict the discourse we teach—and how it intersects with other discourses in the social real—not only teaches our students how to perceive identity but also how to formulate their very selves. This is even more true of our pedagogies than it is of our scholarship since it is in the classroom where students most directly encounter our identity politics. The way we introduce difference and discuss it in the classroom, in short, may disrupt our attempts to exceed structural power relations as much as our students’ own identity politics might. Unfortunately, even pedagogies focused on diversity, equality, and change highlight a similar maintenance of self/Other relations as that found in our scholarship. Composition has recognized this dynamic most recently in reference to multicultural textbooks. Although designed to make up for past exclusions, a close examination of the kinds of readings and writing assignments offered in these texts illustrates a much different scene. As Sandra Jamieson argues, multicultural texts frequently “represent ‘individuals’ of different races and gender in ways that reinforce the hierarchical location of those groups” (159). Texts do so, for example, by asking students to write from the perspective of white male authors, while stepping back from the texts of women and people of color to analyze them from an assumed position of privilege (Jamieson 162–63). Or, by presenting readings that focus on the victimization of the author, textbooks perpetuate the belief that “racism is the problem of ‘others’ who have made themselves victims . . . but can be helped by good whites who are somehow above that system” (168). Yameng Liu points to a similar tendency in crosscultural or international readers that inevitably ask students to contrast the readings to American culture, both reinforcing the dominance of American as the “self ” in a self/Other relation and essentializing other cultures into clearly definable categories. These critiques of readers abound and are more recently being connected both to the absence of difference in our rhetorics (Bryant); the presumed developmental line all “good” writers follow, regardless of difference, implied by hand-books (Janangelo); and the construction of appropriate consumer attitudes in our readers (France). Taken as a group, these critiques of our best insight into practice—the textbooks we use—highlight not only a complicity with the transparency of

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academic discourse but also a continual categorization of difference that, in Liu’s terms, encourages a “harden[ing] into fixed or static perceptions” difference itself, with the result of bringing “the ongoing identity-forming process that is the constant unfolding of the self/Other relationship to a standstill” (88). In this way, our textbooks and pedagogies might easily be seen to support the identity politics students bring with them to our classrooms. These texts do so, in part, by supporting diversity without reference to difference, suggesting a separation of students (again presumed to be white, straight, and middle-class) from the discourses and experiences of the Other. By not associating its position with cultural identity, the message is sent that academic discourse is a neutral position from which to view the Other. Academic tourism conducted by reading experiential accounts of difference support such an assumption. When difference only becomes diversity, the Other is not implicated in power relations but rather provides a personal idiosyncratic account of experience, an assumption aptly supported by assignments that ask students only to view other experiences through their own personal lenses. Simply allowing diverse cultural experiences and literacies into the classroom without a consideration of the identities associated with academic discourse similarly leads to students reimposing the self/Other relation they’ve learned so well in other cultural arenas (and implicitly know exists in our classroom spaces as well). By maintaining the transparency of academic discourse in suggesting it is not associated with the most powerful identities in our culture, composition pedagogy can unwittingly reinvoke colonial relations while seemingly expressing diversity. For example, Carrie Shively-Leverenz describes how a composition course in African American literature, designed to allow for alternative claims to knowledge based in the experience of the largely African American class members, was easily undercut by the authority of one white woman who took on the voice of “academic authority.” This one woman had internalized academic discourse so completely that she could not value experiential authority. As a result she manages to encourage her peer-response group members to “cut” alternative claims to authority in favor of academic literary interpretation, despite the professor’s claims that both were viable. Because of her status as a “great student” and writing tutor—her whiteness, Leverenz implies through its absence, is seemingly (tellingly?) incidental—her peers allow her authority over their writing. Even in a class specifically designed to push the boundaries of academic writing, the students defer to academic discourse even if its voice is in a fellow student. In this way, the contact zone has seemingly failed by reinvoking the power relations it always carries with it, a potential stratification that theorists acknowledge as a possibility (e.g., Bizzell, “Contact” 166; R. Miller). What appears less obviously in how we discuss such dialogic and/or contact zone pedagogies are the ways in which academic discourse and the classroom context may be contributing to such failures. Too often, pedagogies of the contact zone, theorized

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as a “clash . . . in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power, such as colonialism” (Pratt 34), result in simple encounters with difference devoid of the power relations supported by those differences and/or the mutual implication of students’ own identities in the forms of difference they are asked to encounter. By ignoring how the classroom is immersed within identity politics, such attempts at contact can easily serve to replicate power relations by not accounting for the implication of academic discourse in that politic. As Joseph Harris has commented, the contact zone can easily become a space where students “are not so much brought into conflict with opposing views as placed in a kind of harmless connection with a series of exotic others” (“Negotiating” 33). “The very metaphor of contact,” he goes on to argue, implies such a possibility wherein “the image is one of cultures banging or sliding off each other” (33) rather than productively engaging one another. One of the reasons contact zone pedagogy can so easily become academic tourism is, of course, the concept of “safe houses.” In offering a safe space for retreat from contact, where groups can “construct shared understandings, knowledges [and] claims on the world that they can then bring into the contact zone” (40), Pratt seems to suggest that students regroup within already recognized communal identities whenever contact becomes difficult. The implication is that when contact might disrupt identifications with categorical collectivities, the classroom needs to allow the boundaries among identities to be redrawn. Sue Hum summarizes the problems inherent in many multicultural and contact zone pedagogies very well, noting that attempts at hybridity that remain mired in self/Other relations will almost always fail: Understood within the context of the “either-or,” encouraged by essentialist tendencies, hybridity means the (re)production of sovereign subjects, epigones shackled by oppression. Understood in the context of the “bothand,” hybridity represents cultural capital which prevents social critique, diffused in higher education’s ability as an institution to endure a significant amount of internal variation. (577)

Diversity pedagogies presume the “both-and” but only result in “adding” diversity to the mix with no critique of the power relations that prevent difference from actually altering academic discourse. Contact zone pedagogies locate difference in authentic experience that can only be spoken by particular bodies. Both pedagogies highlight identity but ultimately disconnect it from power relations. Contact becomes, in Bruce Horner’s terms, a “harmless connection” because it “assumes both the essential immutability of the individuals’ (presumably different) cultural identities and cultural tourism as its sole motive” (Terms 47). Much like the diversity pedagogies of the 1970s and ’80s, conflict is actively discouraged in favor of accommodation to academic discourse (Lu “Conflict”). Such accommodation suggests accepting not only academic discourse’s epistemology but also its implicit identity politics.

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In this way, composition’s pedagogies, like its scholarship, mirror the public rhetorics of identity our students already bring with them to the classroom: the assumption that difference is only diversity within a liberal-humanist politic, or the assumption that difference is an authentic category that can only be spoken by the bodies that inhabit that category. Pedagogies that attempt to initiate contact in the hopes of resisting institutional ideologies can just as easily reinforce the transparency of academic discourse because its implications in capital remain unscrutinized. Daniel McLaughlin, for example, points out how the attempt to bring Navajo into a reservation school as a way of valuing it and encouraging a dialogic between the Navajo and English worlds sometimes failed. Seeing the juxtaposition between both languages so explicitly led some students, like Ruth Begay, to devalue Navajo because it lacked usefulness in the larger culture. As Ruth puts it in an open letter to the school: “Because English skills are important to the students’ careers, students should spend a lot of time studying English, not Navajo, in high school” (108). In a similar example, Anneliese Kramer-Dahl notes how the “empowering knowledge” purportedly offered her recently immigrated Asian American students in a basic writing course actually had the reverse effect. Students, instead, saw the focus on giving voice to diverse experiences as “a threat to the stasis of their lives at home and their ability to adjust to their new host culture” (251). By valorizing experience as a means of critiquing the dominant, these pedagogies seem ill-prepared for the other ways such an interaction might affect the identity constitution of students who are understandably concerned with the very real material benefits academic discourse can offer them. Without attention to the way academic discourse itself may be complicit in this stratification, there is little space for students to critique the imperialism of academic discourse on their interactions in the classroom. THE WRITING SPACE: THE CENTRAL COLONIAL ENCOUNTER

As important as the readings we assign and how we position experience in the classroom are to supporting self/Other relations, composition’s identity work is arguably accomplished most effectively at the level of text. It is our instruction about writing itself that most obviously communicates to students our identity politics. Through our writing instruction students receive the most vociferous commands about what literacies—and thus what identities—are acceptable within academic discourse. Perhaps the most central way that composition supports self/Other relations exists, then, at the most basic level of what we do: our own writing assignments. How much diversity do we allow in the actual production of texts? Do we see the writing space as equally fraught with identity politics as the reading space? The answer to such questions is, as always, both yes and no. On the one hand, composition has made attempts to incorporate in its writing assignments

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more “intercultural literacy” (Guerra) and has generated assignments, such as autoethnographies (Brodkey, Writing) and literacy autobiographies (Soliday) that ask students to both consider their own multilayered implication in a variety of cultural narratives and the mutual implication they have in many identities. Such assignments go a long way to breaking down the polarization of identities and reductive view of cultural processes’ effects on self that are key to disrupting the self/Other relation. Yet such assignments remain located within the personal. As a result, the implied message is that when writing about self, other discourses and identities are central. If such a message is not sent about other forms of writing, however, how effectively have we intervened? Composition classes, as our students well know, are seen primarily in terms of their service function to the university. As such, students, quite rightly, assume that instruction in more transactional academic writing is where the real value lies in their composition courses. Yet much of the writing assigned in classes focused on intervening into culture and identity maintains the polarization of self/Other. Many writing assignments described as multicultural do this by divorcing writing and content. An apt case in point comes from the early work in discourse communities when composition began to realize, in Terry Dean’s provocative terms, that “when we teach composition, we are teaching culture” (24). Even within such incisive arguments, however, scholars, like Dean, recommend only the inclusion of assignments with varied audiences and topics that allow students to use the knowledge of other cultural communities in the classroom as an appropriate response to a given context. Multicultural content is allowed, yet academic discourse genres, dialect, and norms remain. If literacy and culture are as inextricable as we theorize, however, then content is also inevitably changed by the discourse in which it is produced. Stephen Gilbert Brown offers an intriguing insight into this process in his discussion of teaching in a reservation school where he came to realize that in asking students to study their own culture in his classroom “the act of ‘study’ itself . . . presumes an alienating distance from the object/subject being studied” (238). For students, pedagogies focused solely on schooled writing teach them to speak difference only in another’s terms. Writing assignments that allow experiences of difference as content, but disallow the literacies in which such experience is understood, result in the objectification of another culture held up to the distorting lens of the discourse in which it must be spoken. Students’ own writing is asked to function much like multicultural readings, imposing a false distance on experience. The lesson: The self must be aligned with academic discourse even when describing one’s own experience. Probably the most telling, and surprising, examples of how the teaching of writing sets up self/Other borders, however, come from cultural studies pedagogies. I have until now not discussed cultural studies in my analysis of the potential transparency of academic discourse because this theory, in many ways, avoids the binary associations found in other diversity work. By insisting upon the fluidity

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of subjectivity, defining culture as the entirety of lived experience constructed in concrete historical conditions, and encouraging cultural analyses that recognize both the discursive and material factors working on a given text, cultural studies appears to avoid such colonial relationships. In its ties to materialism, cultural studies also attempts to walk the line between material effects of power and the ever-changing semiotic codes that make up our culture. Such attention to both the material and the discursive, to the structural and the poststructural, to identities as they are lived and socially constructed seems to absent cultural studies’ pedagogies from the critique I am forging here. Not so its writing instruction. While cultural studies may attempt all these things in the analyses it asks students to conduct, a close look at the kinds of writing assigned reveals a much different story. A brief glance at one of the most available edited collections on cultural studies pedagogy, Left Margins, for example, reveals both an absence of discussion of what kinds of writing students do in favor of the analyses they are conducting (e.g., Tremonte; Gutjahr) or assignments that mirror the kinds of academic writing assigned in many other courses from position papers (Giroux), to analytic pieces (Dixon), to analyzing student texts through the lens of a published writer (Wise), to critiques and research projects (Mazurek). In only one article, by feminist Rae Rosenthal, are alternative genres and styles explored in assignments where students are asked to “resist closure” or to “cross-dress.” Most disturbing, as Gary Tate points out in his response to the collection, is the absence of any extended discussion about writing instruction, including how writing is taught or what is being assigned. In most cases, the focus is so much on the types of cultural analyses being conducted that the collection as a whole seems to ignore students as writers, leading Tate to ask how we might “reassess such ‘mainstream’ writing . . . in this context” (273). Even Berlin, in Rhetorics, Poetics, and Cultures, offers only a very brief picture of the writing that occurs in the two courses he describes in such detail, offering a highly textured and complex picture of the kinds of heuristics, discussions, and analyses conducted. Yet only one paragraph in the entire chapter devoted to pedagogy mentions writing beyond the journals and writing-to-learn assignments that helped prompt thinking for the cultural analyses. His brief discussion of writing in these classes is, thus, noteworthy for what it implies: As students develop material through the use of the heuristics and begin to write initial drafts of their essays, they discuss the culturally coded character of all parts of composing—from genre to patterns of organization to sentence structure. Students must learn to arrange their materials to conform to the genre codes of the form of the essay they are writing—the personal essay or the academic essay, for example. . . . These essay genres conform to socially indicated formal codes that students must identify and enact and of course carry great consequence for meaning. . . . Next, at the

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While Berlin goes much further here than the essays in Left Margins by arguing that such norms must be made apparent and discussed for the kinds of meanings they allow and disallow, the focus is still on writing to meet an academic context. Alternative literacies may come under discussion, but they are not practiced in the actual production of texts. Instead, students “must learn” the norms of academic discourse.3 Thus, no matter the content, it is implied, student writing is most appropriately conducted in academic discourse. Of course, it only seems logical that composition courses would ask for writing within academic discourse; that is, after all, our role within the university. By performing that function so well, however, what kinds of borders do we set up? Unfortunately, we set up the precise self/Other relation found in our scholarship, but one with potentially more devastating consequences for identity formation. When introducing this section, that is, I referred to the writing space as “the central colonial encounter” for a reason. The writing space is the space of enunciation. It is where students encounter the subject positions academic discourse proffers for identification most directly. Through the local writing contexts our pedagogies create, we also delineate the enunciative modalities students must learn to negotiate. Through such enunciative modalities, pedagogy prescribes the language students must learn to produce and the borders they must enforce upon their own subjectivities. Producing such language requires that the student writer internalize the enunciative modalities of academic discourse, at least temporarily, in order to write within the given rhetorical situation it creates. That act of producing text further requires that the writing subject unify with a given modality for the space of writing. In other words, writing itself enforces its own borders through the way the subject must engage a given enunciative modality to produce language appropriate to that discursive context. As Susan Miller argues in Rescuing the Subject, one of the key elements of writing production is the “fictional stability” of the writer. Because writing “stops time,” it “requires an active consciousness to divorce it from the flow of everyday events” (43); writing forces the writer to become “conscious of writing” by requiring her to establish a presence that will only exist in those moments in time during which the act of writing occurs (44). Doing so necessitates that the subject unify with a given enunciative modality, suppressing the potential critical agency other subjectivities might provide her to critique the discourse in which she is currently participating. Writers “defer personal desires and motives in favor of highlighting ‘the text’ that is being performed, but that will be ‘fixed’ only in this performance” (15–16). Writers must write with the belief that their thought can be inscribed as reflecting a singular “I,” even as they might be aware of other voices being silenced and/or

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the ways in which readers will create multiple meanings from their text that are out of their control. From Miller’s perspective, the writer is forced to construct a seemingly unified voice for the text itself, a process that requires what she calls the writer’s “self-sacrifice,” a sacrifice of the subject’s multiplicity (15). Poststructuralism’s understanding of the writing space as the site of subjectification and identity construction has significant implications for how students are forced to internalize composition’s colonial gaze. They not only encounter it through reading practices, classroom discussion, and their textbooks, but they are also forced to reproduce this politic themselves in order to successfully write in their composition courses. Writing contexts constructed solely within academic discourse (as the majority of composition assignments are), teach our students, perhaps more forcibly than any other aspect of pedagogy, that the self/Other relations of academic discourse are inviolate. After all, as writers, they are being asked to replicate them in their own language use, which, according to our cultural logics, presumably express their individual thoughts, not those of academic discourse. In this way, the site of language production plays a prominent role in (re)producing academic discourse’s identity politics. Composition pedagogy not only suggests self/Other borders; the writing practices it proscribes actually force students to participate in enforcing those borders upon themselves. Through the act of writing, the students are positioned within academic discourse, compelled to resee their own subjectivities through this discourse. They are, in a sense, asked to occupy the position of “self” in academic discourse’s self/Other relation, an act where they are incited to gaze upon their Other subjectivities through this new lens. By restricting alternative literacies from the classroom context in its most valued form—the writing done in a composition class—we take the last step in supporting the self/Other relation so associated with imperialist power. A central element of the self/Other relation is what the discourse seeks to exclude or marginalize. In a binary identity relation, other discourses would be seen as a threat, or at the very least, inappropriate interventions into academic discourse’s realm. It is all too likely given the way writing assignments are constructed that the exclusion of alternative literacies suggests just such forms of restriction to our students, and thus the disassociation of the Other from academic discourse. My analysis of the literacy autobiographies, in fact, has already suggested that language plays just such a role in supporting self/Other relations. In their images of restriction, the students indicated that academic discourse achieves part of its power by its ability to exclude other ways of using language that do not fit within these parameters. Such restrictive, border-creating practice is something we’ve seen time and time again in composition research as well. One of the effects of teaching writing, particularly for students of difference, is the perceived sense (and often reality) that literate practices valued in other contexts cannot be drawn on as a source of strength when writing academic discourse. Tellingly such practices are excluded purposefully by the students, illustrating their sense of the discursive boundaries created by academic discourse.

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Valerie Balester’s study of speakers of Black English Vernacular (BEV) in Cultural Divide illustrates this sense of exclusion brilliantly. All the students Balester studied were successful in academics and maintained a strong sense of an African American identity linked to their use of BEV. Despite their confidence in both areas, however, these students either deliberately restricted BEV rhetorical styles from their academic writing and/or were misread when they attempted to use them. Balester’s reading of Shanique’s considerable skill at persuasion and narrative when using BEV is most provocative here. In oral contexts, Shanique offers compelling narratives in the BEV tradition of “bad talk” and significant evidence for her opposition to hazing on college campuses in a persuasive rhetoric also linked to this tradition. Yet in her academic writing on both subjects, Shanique excludes these rhetorical styles and, as a result, produces papers deemed unpersuasive, lacking in evidence, and a narrative wherein she is determined to be purposeless and even cruel. Max, another student, does try to draw on the BEV rhetorical style of preaching, yet his paper is judged as wordy and his style overblown as a result. The exclusion of alternative literate practices, whether perceived or real, functions to create the implicit demand that language be limited to academic discourse within its rhetorical contexts. In Max and Shanique, we see echoed the literacy autobiographies’ perceptions that academic discourse not only restricts other practices but also that such limitations function to silence students’ potential contributions constructed in alternative literacies. Although compositionists struggle mightily to encourage border crossing and break down identity hierarchies, our students accurately perceive not only that there is a border but also that it should not be crossed. Students learn (or, more accurately, relearn) the hierarchy of identity relations they bring with them from the public sphere. They are reassured that constructing identifications with academic discourse is to construct a nonidentity, one associated only with institutions and “success.” They also learn, yet again, that the identities of the Other are unwelcome, not as valuable, or useful only as a commodity and/or a position through which to reaffirm the transparent identities of our culture. Composition’s work—in its scholarship, and through scholarship to pedagogy, textbooks, and writing assignments—supports such lessons in multiple ways. Composition theory aligns academic discourse with transparent identities and capital, while our pedagogies ensure the effects of such a colonial discourse: the recreation of Otherness, the objectification of difference, and the exclusion of the Other via literacy practice. THE CONSEQUENCES OF ACADEMIC DISCOURSE’S SELF/OTHER RELATION

It is all well and good to imply, through composition’s published work and research, that academic discourse both inscribes a self/Other relation and imposes it upon how students come to view their own identities; however, the key

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questions remain. What effect does such an identity politic have on students? Do they pick up on the relationships composition theory and pedagogy imply? The literacy autobiographies not only suggest that they do; the students’ texts also highlight how devastating internalizing academic discourse’s identity politics can be. In keeping with composition pedagogy and scholarship, the students align their Other discourses with recognizable identity categories of race, gender, sexuality, and class, and further suggest that these discourses are most intimately connected to lived experience, body, and maintaining the social relations they care deeply about. Similarly, the autobiographies maintain the transparency of academic discourse by characterizing it only in terms of education, institutions, and, most significantly, “success.” In short, the autobiographies, not surprisingly, replicate academic discourse’s identity politics fairly clearly. What is more startling is the impact internalizing such an identity politic has on how the students come to view themselves, their literacies, and the requirements academic discourse imposes upon them to be “successful.” Academic discourse, the students imply, orchestrates a “splitting” of self that forces them to view other identifications through the gaze of the new discourse they are attempting to master. Such a gaze, in line with composition’s identity politics, leads the students to devalue the literacy practices through which such identifications are voiced. Accepting academic discourse’s self/Other relations, that is, also sets up an inside/outside relationship that reflects back upon—turns the gaze upon—the discursive practices being excluded. Unlike Balester’s students who continued to value BEV even as they excluded it from schooled writing, some of the literacy autobiographies go so far as to suggest that seeking identifications with academic discourse negatively impacts the writers’ relationship to previously valued discursive practices—and, we are forced to infer, quite possibly to the identities with which such literacies are associated. The discussions of other cultural discourses appear most often in texts written by female and working-class students as well as students of color and gay and lesbian students. Given our current cultural scene, these students seem best able to discern how their gender, class, sexuality, or race has allied part of their “selves” with perspectives and literacies that emerge from their difference. Their Otherness is obvious to them: a “mark” not apparent in the texts of more “mainstream” students, even though academic discourse seeks to impact the latter’s identities as much as any other student. The autobiographies represent an altered perspective on these discursive identifications by commenting on how the discourse’s languages appear antithetical to academic discourse and how that opposition implies that they must learn a new way of speaking and writing. Rather than seeing such opposition as suggesting the need for code-switching between two languages, the writers suggest that academic discourse seeks to exclude that which does not reflect its language and perspective. The way in which academic literacy appears almost antithetical to other literacies or discourses can be seen fairly clearly in Cathy’s text. Cathy, a graduate

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student, compares her own literacy and home background with that of basic writers, remarking that “I suspect that being read to frequently was not an experience many [basic writers] share with me. On the other hand, having parents or at least one parent who works long hours in a factory may not be so atypical. But even my ‘blue collar’ ties are rather weak. Education is highly valued in my family.” Through her text’s link between weak blue-collar ties and the significance of education, Cathy implies that blue-collar ties are somehow a threat to schooled literacy education and what it embodies. Her own success, she intimates, is a result of how those ties were subverted because her family encouraged reading and valued education, a value she suggests is opposed to those usually held by blue-collar families. In this implicit contrast, Cathy reproduces a clear binary relation wherein working-class perspectives are at odds with educational values. Even though she sees her own family as exceeding this binary, it is an oppositional relationship she clearly accepts as accurate despite her local experience to the contrary. Academic discourse’s association with middle-class values becomes the yardstick by which she measures her own “blue collar ties,” and, most significantly, by which she distances herself from a working-class perspective by emphasizing how “weak” such ties are. Through such distancing, Cathy illustrates what becomes a recurring connection in some of the literacy autobiographies: the “problem” other discursive practices cause in pursuing success with schooled language. As a result, the writers come to view these literacies as less valuable. For example, Diane, a basic writer, more directly links her family’s background to her problems achieving an identified relationship with academic discourse. Like Cathy, her discussion implies that a working-class background embodies a perspective that threatens academic discourse, and as a result, must be altered. However, Diane discusses this effect in more explicitly linguistic terms, tying it to the surface features of her language. A white woman of European descent, Diane connects her lack of facility with schooled language to her parents’ educational backgrounds, and by implication, to their socioeconomic class. She relates that she is “still struggling with the proper usage of words” and blames this struggle on not learning “correct” and “proper” language at home: “My parents lack of education lead to my inability to practice correct grammatical skills.” In order to gain this “proper” and “correct” language, Diane is willing to grant control over her language to others, intimating her desire for new identifications with a more valued discourse even as it devalues her other linguistic practices. In fact, she is grateful to those who correct her. In the following passage, she seeks out a teacher, who embarrassed her by pointing out her incorrect usage in a math class, in order to ask her about what “the right way to say different words were”: I remember being embarrassed during a high school math class. I was saying something and I used the phrase “real bad.” My math teacher stopped and stared at me, she then asked me to repeat my sentence. I used the same

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phrase again. She asked me if I knew what was wrong in my sentence. Obviously I didn’t. . . . Following that incident, I became very self conscious of the words that I would use. I wanted to speak correctly so I had to accept my problem and start learning the proper way to speak. I knew I had to speak proper English if I expected to be successful. I would ask her if what I said was incorrect or not because I was ready to learn the right way to use words. (my emphasis)

Despite her embarrassment, Diane desires such correction because she wanted “to be successful,” indicating her belief in academic discourse’s will to knowledge. She believes both that schooled language is the route to success and that her working-class language is what is threatening that success, acknowledging academic discourse’s transparency. It does not prescribe options for identity construction; it is only a means to a desired end. Her other literacy, however, is deeply embedded in the social relations of family. Difference is tied to lived experience and body, while academic discourse is associated only with “success.” Diane’s desire for academic discourse’s cultural currency leads to the need for identification, an identification that causes her to see her current linguistic code as inadequate and thus that which must be excluded. This exclusion, presumably, also includes the identity that speaks this code. In its discussion of giving up her linguistic code, Diane’s text only infers how the subjectivity forged with the language’s discourse must also be restricted for this new identification to be successful. Others are more overt about this connection between language use and subjectivity. Joe, for example, closes his text by commenting upon the modifications in his thinking he has already experienced in college. The text ends with the line: “Change is a good thing, now we have to do our good thing and change too.” Joe’s text also implies how it is the self that must change in order to adjust to the discourse, and further demonstrates the nature of the change that this discourse requires: “Everywhere I go there is a need for different writing styles. Achieving those writing styles is a very complex process. Writing styles change from grade school to high school and even again in college. I being the only member of my family to go to college have to accommodate for all of these drastic changes” (my emphasis). It is his working-class roots that Joe puts in apposition to “I” in this excerpt. Like Cathy and Diane, Joe seems to intuit that his working-class perspective is somehow undesirable in academic discourse. As a result, it is this “I,” or subjectivity, that must shift or “accommodate” academic discourse. In an interesting move, Aretha indicates that identifying with academic discourse might require her to change her relationship to her “home” language, but she is unwilling to cut her ties with this community in order to accomplish this. Like most of the basic writers, Aretha comments on how academic discourse seeks to affect her relationship to other cultural discourses by changing her attitude toward its language. Aretha, an African American woman, has learned through school to avoid anything that sounds like “bad grammar,” especially the

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language of her friends and family. Rather than give up her ties to this community, however, she seeks to change their language as well as her own. Aretha reports that she constantly “corrects” the language of those around her, particularly family members. In this way, she seeks to change her family’s relationship to another cultural discourse as well as her own. She tries to prevent her desire to access the power she intuits in schooled language from distancing her from friends and family. In her attempt to change her family’s language as well as her own, Aretha senses how changing linguistic identifications alters the collectivity of bodies through which identities come to be marked and categorized in the collectivities suggested by self/Other relations. In each of these cases, the writers suggest that a boundary must be drawn between alternative literacies and academic literacy if identification with academic discourse is to be achieved. The implication is that these other literacies interfere with identification by connecting the students to other perspectives and linguistic practices which cannot be represented in this new discourse because they could potentially challenge the exclusive right to name the world that this discourse claims. Other literacies impinge upon control with schooled language because they serve as reminders of other practices, other identities that suggest a more multiple self than that necessary for identification. LaVonne’s text provides one of the clearest examples of why the students believe the exclusion of other identities is the key to achieving identification with academic discourse. LaVonne, an African American woman, obliquely ties her inability to achieve control in academic discourse to other linguistic practices. She comments that her biggest problem with writing in school is with structure because she writes the way she talks. She further tries to “watch” her speech because she has been corrected so many times for her use of dialect. LaVonne mentions that she is working on both her structure and language, but comments further that when she is trying to make a point, “I’m liabel to say anything.” It is at the precise point when she wants to exercise intention and wield the power of this discourse—making a point—that she loses control of the discourse because other ways of using language intervene. In the text’s remarks on “working on structure” and “watching language,” we see LaVonne’s unconscious willingness to restrict these ways of using language if she is to attain the culturally sanctioned power academic discourse can give her to exercise her intentions. In this way, academic discourse’s support of self/Other relations also apparently sets the stage for new identifications to be formed with academic discourse, and thus new identities. The upshot of such an identity politic is not necessarily how other literacies are excluded but the options the discourse seemingly makes available for identity construction. Academic literacy functions to implicate the students in a self/Other relation that they may not have previously recognized. This act of “splitting,” or seeing self through a new gaze can begin quite early as in Rajiv’s case. In Rajiv’s literacy autobiography, especially his descriptions of reading and writing from childhood through college, he offers continuing pic-

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tures of how literacy practices force him both to recognize his difference as a gay man and come face-to-face with its exclusion from the narratives available to explain the self. The trauma of the gaze marking one as Other through literacy is nowhere more poignant than in the epigraph with which I began this chapter: “I don’t want the prince to marry the princess. It’s not fair. I ask my mother why the prince always had to marry the princess. My mother says so they can live happily ever after.” Living happily ever after, academic and other socially approved forms of literacy suggest, means living straight. Similarly, in Cathy, Diane, Joe, Aretha, and LaVonne’s experiences with schooled language, living happily ever after means constructing identifications within academic discourse and marginalizing others, usually associated with “primary” identities. More than simply creating borders, then, academic literacy also lays the groundwork for identifying with its subject positions in preparation for identity construction. The devaluation of alternative literacies in the literacy autobiographies points not only to a different perspective on the past, but also to the potential “choices” students may be incited to make in the present. Accepting the hierarchies within academic discourse suggests that the student writers might also be prepared to apply academic discourse’s identity politics to their own identity formation. The choices they might make, that is, do not seem as open or fluid as we might hope. Rather, immersed as they are within academic discourse’s self/Other relations, it seems more likely that such fluidity may become fixed into the static perceptions and categorization of identities that permeate our culture and its educational institutions.

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interchapter four : Loss and Gain

Starting with Lucy’s comment so long ago about living in a “ghetto,” my attempt to recreate the appropriate body and mind of a middle-class academic has a long history: a history it has taken as long to “unlearn” as it did to invent. Somewhere in the middle of working on my Ph.D., I became as disturbed by the growing sense of loss I experienced in working-class contexts as I did by my imposter syndrome at school. My family members now find me strange. My friends from home are confused about my priorities, listening to what worries me yet obviously bemused at what draws my attention. I can’t win a political argument with my father at age thirty-nine when I could at seventeen because I’ve lost the ability to argue in ways his discourse community values. I now prefer to work alone rather than surrounded by the incessant noise of living—voices raised in argument, a neighbor’s stereo, cars passing on a busy street. As important as these lost markers of membership in a working-class community are, most disturbing is how difficult it is to define a certain way of looking at the world that seems lost to me: a focus on material action that has been superseded by a belief in the materiality of thought, a commonsensical view of everyday life that is now abstracted, the ability to find the humor in the mundane, the respect for all types of work whether it be teaching or washing dishes, a passion for the communal. These brief attempts to pinpoint the worldview that is lost are accurate yet incomplete; my very inability to provide a complete picture is perhaps most distressing of all. There are still aspects, of course, of my working-class identifications that I retain. But they are mostly those aspects of self that fit well with larger cultural ideologies: a strong work ethic, perseverance in the face of diversity, a desire for consumption. Thankfully, not all aspects of this worldview were marginalized; instead, some remained to sustain me through the recreation of self I orchestrated for so long. For example, I will always be more grateful than he can ever know for my father’s reaction when I decided to quit graduate school after the ambee-vaylence incident. The next night, almost brought to tears by my inability to understand an F. R. Leavis essay, I called my father to ask for money for a plane ticket home. He refused, reminding me to not give up and let the “fuckers get you down.” Instead, he said I had to stick it out until Christmas; if I didn’t return then it would be okay.

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By then, of course, I had rewritten myself enough that grad school no longer seemed impossible. Without this shared value of perseverance, however, I would be back home in Worcester right now. In this way, I retain many of the values of a working-class community even as I have lost much of its worldview. What I retain, however, is primarily that which can be tied to my personal life: an all encompassing fear of debt that made me retch when I signed my first mortgage, a desire to “hang out” in blue-collar bars, a sense that exercise cannot possibly be considered “fun” (physical labor is work). While my work ethic translates well into my professional life, it frequently also results in an attitude toward leisure my colleagues find inexplicable. Out there is also a part of self, a part of culture, an identification with people I value, a unique way of looking at problems that have all been partially wiped away by my pursuit of economic success: I have become inscribed within the dominant in the ways I always desired and such inscription has granted me the success I sought. Like Richard Rodriguez, this scholarship girl can only lament the past, never having realized the cultural rewriting she was performing on herself all those years. Social mobility came with economic mobility so subtly that only in retrospect does it provide the explanation for the painful conflicts of the past and the losses of the present. Just as disturbing is how it took the language of the academy to even realize this loss, to put into words what has happened to my own subjectivity and identity. It was only late in graduate school, in reading Foucault, Marxist theory, feminist theory, and so on, that I began to gain a critical vocabulary that could allow me to resee myself and the “choices” I had made over the years. Without such languages, I have to wonder if I ever would have come to claim my working-class identity as something of value, to spend time trying to convince other educators that class is not simply economic status but as real and as lived as experiences of race, gender, and sexuality. To explain the anger I can no longer submerge when I read essays like Lynn Bloom’s “Freshman Composition as a Middle-Class Enterprise” that presume she is talking to an audience with the same middle-class background and values as her own. The teacher class, I am constantly reminded, is presumed to have always been middle-class. Even attempting to re-member the body that can offer such critical perspectives has its own twist. I can’t help being struck by the irony that I am now a writer whom a blind article reviewer can accuse of having a “hyper-academic style that almost mimics critical theory.” The very rewriting of self I had accomplished had gone so far that now I was hyperextending the discourse and criticized for not letting my “natural” voice come through. Yet it was only through these theories I was now being criticized for mimicking too strongly that I even came to understand what my voice was, or could be. The ultimate irony is that hyperliterate academic writing is probably the closest thing to a natural voice I now have. It is the other voices I have to work at. It takes incredible energy and constant vigilance to re-member self, to bring alternative experiences to the fore.

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Accepting “white trash” as a label of power. Recalling that at one time I spoke Ebonics as fluently as I now write theory. The blushing admission of how proud I once was that, although I am only fluent in English, I can swear in nine languages (Polish, Greek, Italian, Spanish, French, Swedish, German, and Swahili). Recollecting the power of argument based in ethos, not logic; the pure joy of weaving a story without a point. A deep longing for the intimacy of spaces populated by too many people in too few rooms. The yearning for the sounds of the city, for the multiaccented experiences of my youth too absent in the middle-class, white-collar, white town in which I now reside. It is much easier to remain aligned with the discourse that has so benefited me than it is to see the Other that is me as a point from which to critique and offer an alternative vision of schooling in professional contexts. It takes a deliberate act of reorganizing self to re-member. I do not lament what I have gained or the new discourses that are now available to me. What disturbs me is that my changes were always in one direction: toward normalcy, toward success, at the expense of other identifications that might conflict with these goals. The pain of constructing these new identifications will always be with me as will the struggle not to let it overwhelm my connections to people whom I value greatly. I still hang out with my closest friends from my past: people who are now cops, power plant workers, meter readers. I still value the opinions of less educated family members. But, oh, how hard I had to work to maintain those ties without letting the assumption that I “know better” or “know more” because I have been granted a piece of paper and the titles of “Dr.” and “Professor.” How do I resist even their assumptions that I have a status they do not or explain why I am so reluctant to ever use these titles? There was, however, little to indicate that it could be otherwise in my schooling until I had reached the highest levels of education: only after being so normalized am I told that my best source of critical work might be in those voices I had suppressed for so long. Why, I feel like screaming, was it so hard to realize that there were alternatives? But there was little incentive to maintain social ties and much incentive for economic mobility, especially for this white body who can disassociate from difference. Choosing to be poor was not an option then or now. And choosing success meant then, as now, to choose sameness. Unlearning the sameness is the bitch.

chapter five

The Turn to Identity: Multiplicity and Agency within Material Relations of Power

I feel like my story is breaking down in places. I wonder if the further my story gets immersed in an academic context, the less I am able to tell the stories of my emotional connections to reading and writing. As I’ve progressed through my years of literacy, I’ve felt a tension—the tension to “write my age,” to let go of the child-language I love, and write like a “twenty-two year old” (academic—a title that doesn’t fit—why?)—whatever that means. I think this tension is pulling my story apart. There are too many interpretive voices at various ages—I don’t know which one to record. —Margaret’s literacy autobiography NOT ALL SUBJECT POSITIONS BECOME a permanent part of self, particularly

if we see identity as made up of multiple, conflicting subject positions. As such, identity is never prefigured deterministically, but is a continual process of occupying new subject positions and discarding others. When we combine the discursive processes of subjectification with the material experience of students in the larger culture and our classrooms, however, two premises become clear: (1) academic discourse does influence the construction of self, and (2) it does so within matrices of power that are both micro and macropolitical, functioning at the levels of writing practice in particular institutional contexts and the connections to the larger culture that institutional validation invokes. Thus, while identity might best be defined as “points of temporary attachment to the subject positions which discursive practices construct for us,” introducing power into the formulation forces us to consider whether attachments with discourse are felt and enacted as if they were temporary, or whether certain attachments come to be seen as inextricable while others are open to reformulation, distancing, or even detachment from our sense of “primary” identity (Hall, “Who” 6).

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Through a close reading of the literacy autobiographies, I argue that identifications with academic discourse, are, indeed, forged in multiple ways. The autobiographies present identity formation as taking place within a confluence of many factors that affect the choices student writers make when constructing their identities: the self/Other relations of academic discourse and the larger culture, their desires for economic success and the material rewards it might confer, and their understandings of identity as embedded in the body, categorical identities, and social relations. In sum, the multiple influences I have consistently returned to throughout this text—discursive subjectification, institutional validation, capitalist desire, presumptions about autonomy, and public rhetorics of identity inflected by material experiences of body— all play a role in the eventual identity formation of our students. Given the variety of influences operating upon them, it is not surprising that identity formation rarely works the same way for individual students. Although these divergent influences could easily be seen to support the contention that identity formation is an unpredictable process where no outcomes can be guaranteed in advance, there is also a certain predictability to this formation. In contrast to the instability of culture, the literacy autobiographies point to the influence of structural power relations upon the seemingly multiple options offered through conflicting and contesting contexts. While identity formation does not work the same way for any of the writers, the literacy autobiographies highlight well McLaren’s insight that “people can be situated very differently within the same totalizing structures of oppression” (Predatory, original emphasis 132). It is these varying situations, and their links to bodies and categorical identities, that pose the greatest threat to composition theory’s reliance upon the fluidity of the subject as the source of a writer’s agency. While multiplicity is, indeed, possible, the subject’s fluidity almost comes to a standstill in the autobiographies. Choices about identity construction result from hierarchical relations that incite students to ignore their multiplicity, erase it, or see it as a “problem” to be resolved. The way students orchestrate their identity formation within academic discourse illustrates, that is, almost a deliberate erasure of the critical sense multiplicity might provide them to critique culture. Taking their direction from public rhetorics of schooling and identity, the students suggest that multiplicity is neither a desired option nor possible to access as a source of agency. Instead, the literacy autobiographies present identity formation as functioning in direct correlation with the self/Other relations embedded in capitalist discourses of schooling. THE MAKING AND REMAKING OF AT TACHMENTS: TEMPORARY SUTURES OR NEW IDENTITIES?

Identity, even if its possibilities operate within binary logics, is never a sealed or closed entity. Although identity hierarchies certainly operate within contemporary society, such hierarchies need not lead only to identifications aligned with

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transparency. Rather, as Bhabha has argued persuasively, even in colonial discourses and societies, ambivalence is present and hybridity a possibility. Thus, the postcolonial analysis I put forth in the previous chapter need not imply that students seeking to identify with academic discourse necessarily must form an identity only in accordance with that discourse’s subject positions. However, if identity formation operates as a something we narrate to ourselves, then that story is also one that must be told via the kinds of representations made available for its construction (Hall, “Old” 49). There are only so many narratives from which to choose, and academic discourse provides a particularly persuasive one given its links to capital, social body, and consumerist practices. While identity formation may be a process of choosing from among the available options, such choices are also located in the vision of a body/subject who sees through eyes influenced by the cultural representations she has internalized and the material effects of those representations she has experienced in the social real. As such, we might best imagine self/Other relations as also representing a choice—a choice of what an individual “others” in order to narrate a self to herself, in order to construct identifications with some bodies and distance herself from others. As Hall explains such a process, it includes a degree of positionality from which such choices are made: “This is the Other that belongs inside me. This is the Other that one can only know from the place which one stands. This is the self as it is inscribed in the gaze of the Other” (“Old” 48). Hall’s reference to the gaze here is crucial to the question of identity formation in academic discourse. Although we may choose our identity formation through multiple logics of self/Other, those logics cannot be extracted from how the Other gazes upon the self, how others see the identities we have chosen to construct. In this way, the discursive is again connected to the real. Literacy practices not only proffer particular positions for identity construction but also remind us of the collectivities with which they help us remain allied and the ways “good, successful, capitalist” bodies signify in the social real. Discourse and body are inextricably related as Royster provocatively points out: . . . discourse is embodied and it is endowed. It is, in fact, quite a peoplecentered enterprise, and it is the fact of its people-centeredness that endows it so insidiously with the workings of social, political, and cultural processes. By such processes, we contend with the imposition of values, beliefs, and expectations through language; with the deployment of systems of power, control, privilege, entitlement, and authority through language; with the engendering of habits, protocols, systems of value through language—all processes with which we are now too familiar. (“Academic Discourses” 25)

Academic discourse, Royster reminds us, is also always a social relation. Embedded within such social relations, the composition classroom is also the space where academic discourse’s gaze—of other bodies, of ideology, of how literacies

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signify in the social real—can be located and internalized. This gaze is, further, one that students may have already internalized and/or realized because it mirrors that found in so many other public rhetorics as well as the students’ lived experiences of the world where some bodies “count” more than others. Most centrally, to succeed in composition classrooms, students seek out and construct identifications with new subject positions located in the very discourse that constructs this gaze, making them complicit in, literally, othering them-selves. If academic discourse represents the self, located both within the student and within the bodies that gaze upon her, what effect might it have on those identities the discourse implicitly “others” through writing practice? The literacy autobiographies have already told us one of the possible effects: the restriction and devaluation of other literacies. Inhabiting academic discourse’s gaze by acceding to its demands to marginalize other literacies indicates how prepared students may be to construct identifications within the discourse. Such restriction and denigration, that is, also works discursively to orchestrate identification. For identification to move to identity (for subject positions to be interiorized in an act of self-construction), Hall argues, the space of identification must construct an “outside”—that which identity is not—in order to be orchestrated. In identifying with one position, we come to exclude others in order to mark the boundaries by which we might constitute self. Significantly, such marking of boundaries is inextricably linked to linguistic difference. Identifying with a given subject position requires the creation of borders between the discursive practice of a given enunciative modality and those practices that do not fall within this discourse’s parameters. Such borders serve to create a seemingly stable space within which identification can be orchestrated, marking a clear boundary between one space of identification and others, so that identifications can be perceived as fixed. From a Foucauldian perspective, this stability serves to reassure the subject that identification functions in favor of the autonomous self whose identity can be individuated. By demarcating such discursive boundaries, identification achieves a continuous relationship with the discourse, unthreatened by the fluidity of identity and the instability of discursive relations. As we saw in chapter 3, identification takes place primarily to erase the sense of discontinuity between the subject and discourse, helping us undermine the “dispersion of self ” Foucault argues is the necessary effect of speaking within a particular enunciative modality. As a result, identifications can only be constructed when they are assumed to be self-referential: when we identify with a position that seemingly offers the agency of a unified, autonomous self unconnected to the fluidity so disruptive to our concepts of Being. To preserve this sense of individuation, identification must construct an “outside”—that which this identity is not—in order to be orchestrated: a linguistically visible self/Other relation that reflects the “gaze” we have imposed upon ourselves through the cultural narrative operating most persuasively in a given moment. In identifying with one position, we

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come to exclude others in order to mark our own identity as sacrosanct, as a clear presence within culture. We can only do this, Hall explains, by stopping the flow of discourse, by fixing the play of différance through the creation of symbolic boundaries. Identification is, then, a process of articulation, a suturing, an over-determination or a lack, but never a proper fit, a totality. Like all signifying, it is subject to the ‘play’ of difference. It obeys the logic of more-than-one. And since as a process it operates across difference, it entails discursive work, the binding and marking of symbolic boundaries, the production of ‘frontier effects’. It requires what is left outside, its constitutive outside, to consolidate the process. (Hall, “Who?” 3)

Part of the way we mark such boundaries is by learning what forms of language must be excluded so that our attempts to create new identifications can be successful. By restricting other literacies from its purview, academic discourse creates such “symbolic boundaries,” ensuring an “outside” by which its own identifications can be constructed as seemingly self-referential. It excludes to create the possibility for a discursively constructed identity that does not recognize itself as such and is not disturbed by the threat alternative literacies might pose to its exclusive claim to knowledge and ways of being. Through such restriction of alternative practices, academic discourse creates Hall’s “frontier effect” by which a given discourse “binds and marks” the symbolic boundaries of its subject positions, assuring the subjects who willingly seek it out that its identifications offer a stable, autonomous identity. In this light, the contrast the literacy autobiographies invoke between the value of academic literacy and other literacies is no accident. By coming to see alternative literacies as the problem to be resolved in seeking out this new identification, the writers suggest that identification is only possible when the space of discourse is clearly marked by symbolic boundaries among diverse linguistic practices, and thus, the identities with which they are associated. Such demarcation secures a fixed point of identification, serving as the precursor for processes of identity construction. Altering students’ sense of language use also does much more than prepare students to construct identifications with academic discourse. At best, excluding other literacies initiates an equivalent restriction of the subject’s multiplicity during the act of identification. At worst, such boundaries encourage us to accept the hierarchies to which identities are subjected in the social real. In the literacy autobiographies, the exclusion of other literacies also leads to a denigration of those literacies, suggesting that a similar disparagement of the cultural identities with which they are associated may not be far behind. As such, the literacy autobiographies add significantly to our understanding of how academic discourse’s self/Other relations become embedded in literacy practice in ways that extend far beyond constructing temporary identifications that “stop time”

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in performances that are fixed only while producing text (S. Miller 43). Attachments made as subjects of particular enunciative modalities may be “temporary,” but the borders created so that such attachments can be performed remain, constructing the gaze students internalize to guide identity construction. If the desire for a particular discourse’s identifications is influential enough, it seems entirely possible that the fluidity of subjectivity can be threatened. Foucault helps highlight just what this threat might involve, suggesting that a will to knowledge can entail a more encompassing effect than the multiplicity of the subject usually presumes. Although he rarely uses such totalizing language, Foucault implies that a particular discursive formation can produce a will to knowledge that incites subjects to constitute all of their experience within a particular formation and encourages them to see only through its particular worldview. We see this implication in his reference to such an inscription in seventeenth-century England: “Going back a little in time, to the turn of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries . . . a will to knowledge emerged which imposed upon the knowing subject—in some ways taking precedence over all experience—a certain position, a certain viewpoint, and a certain function (look rather than read, verify rather than comment) (“Discourse” 218). This “will to knowledge” further “tends to exercise a sort of pressure, a power of constraint upon other forms of discourse” (219). This narrative, in short, can become so persuasive that the discourse seeks to constrain multiplicity, confining all of a subject’s discursive relationships within a single discursive formation. Through a persuasive will to knowledge, discursive formations seek to form a unified subject whereby the subject deliberately excludes subjectivities that might threaten its exclusive claims to knowledge. The power embodied within a discursive formation attempts to form subjectivities continuous with the multiple discourses by which a particular historical formation ensures the effects of power remain similar. Such a confluence of multiple discourses in favor of similar power effects relies upon a will to knowledge that “takes precedence over all experience” (“Discourse” 218). That academic discourse might function in just this way seems probable given how persuasive its will to knowledge is for some students and why it is so persuasive: its links to capitalism, economic benefits, and care for self. Academic discourse possesses a forcible power to inscribe subjects not necessarily found in other discourses. The students’ other cultural discourses do not exist in an equal power dynamic with academic discourse because they are marginalized, in a way academic discourse is not, within the social real. Particularly when immersed in its context, the students are encouraged to see the institution’s will to knowledge as all consuming. In their relatively powerless position, it would not be surprising if academic discourse were perceived or internalized by the students in such a way that it appears to be totalizing. Only this knowledge “counts” in this context; thus, other ways of claiming knowledge seem superfluous. By deciding to attend college, they have already agreed to participate in seeing the world

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through the institution’s perspective. Further, academic discourse is not only influential in the students’ immediate context; it also serves as the gate through which subjects must pass before accessing the power of other cultural discourses. Still part of a multiple signifying economy, academic discourse forms an institutional nexus around which multiple discourses of power organize, connecting diverse institutions, values, and experiences. In this way, academic discourse may enforce structural power relations on subjects by creating inescapable desires for identification with it. This potentially structural relation encourages us to remember that, while differences may be relational, these relations function within particular social and political economies. It is this connection to overdetermined structures of difference, however, where Foucault’s explanatory power fails. Foucault implies that modes of subjugation don’t discriminate and are equal for everyone (see Sawicki); however, the literacy autobiographies contradict this presumption. The autobiographies indicate, instead, that the effect of a culturally sanctioned discourse, such as academic discourse, is not an equal one with all its subjects. UNDERMINING AGENCY: IDENTIFICATIONS WITHIN THE GAZE OF ACADEMIC DISCOURSE

Almost all the autobiographies point to how the academy can become a site of contestation among discourses. The writers, no matter their race, class, gender, or sexual orientation, report the significant influence academic discourse can have on the writers’ construction of self. As a result, almost all the autobiographies demonstrate how school’s will to knowledge achieves its power through its links to other dominant cultural discourses that delineate the means of achieving power in the economic and civic realms of adult life. By believing academic discourse’s knowledge to be the route to success in these other realms, the students submit themselves to the discourse, interiorizing it in such a way that its perspective on the world becomes an inextricable part of their own way of seeing. Yet, it is only the more marginalized students—the Others: nonmasculine, nonwhite, nonmiddle-class, nonheterosexual—who feel that they must change their relationship with other cultural discourses in order to achieve this success. Although processes of identification need not threaten multiplicity, identifying with academic discourse does pose a threat to other subjectivities, differentially impacting the autobiography writers depending on the cultural status of the discourse with which such attachments have been made. The literacy autobiographies demonstrate how the cultural status of competing discourses expose some identities to the threat of altered identity constitution more than others. Identities marginalized in culture (marked by the Other in self/Other relations) are, not surprisingly, more at risk from the power of academic discourse than are other more culturally “acceptable” identities. Further, the autobiographies imply, even the “other” identities within the oft-chanted

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quartet of multiculturalism (gender, race, class, and sexuality) are impacted in differential relations of power. The cultural validation academic discourse receives through its institution appears to be at the crux of this inequitable subjugation. Through its links to dominant discourses, the institution marginalizes that which the dominant culture has marginalized, thus playing its role of training for citizenship. Within its realm, cultural discourses not viewed as possessing power in the dominant realm— particularly those of race, class, gender, and sexuality—are seen as undesirable, and further, as a threat to what academic discourse embodies. The literacy autobiography writers internalize academic discourse’s gaze, accepting its self/Other relations wherein schooled language indicates an unmarked nonidentity in direct opposition to the social fabric in which “other” literacies are embedded: home, family, friends. The nonidentity is incomparable to others, is not embedded in social relations of real bodies, and marks the individual only in relation to capital, not to collective identities. The writers’ intuition that academic discourse is attached to institutional power rather than individuals (see chapter 2) prevents them from associating identities with the economic signification of its institutional validation. Instead, academic discourse clearly marks boundaries for identification that signify material relations seemingly separate from the identity formation its discourse seeks to orchestrate. Language is linked to identity when it is Other; it is embedded within everyday life, people whom we care about, and our daily interactions. The language of academic discourse, however, functions without any such comparability or connection to everyday life. As a result, academic discourse’s transparency also helps “hide” its discourse’s invocation to new identifications. If discursive identification is seen not to influence identity, subjectification can more easily be orchestrated upon a subject who has apparently “chosen” to identify with it. When considering whether identity can/should be remade in favor of power, then, the writers distinguish between attachments that are temporary and those that are permanent, taking their direction from current political and social arrangements. The transparency of identity and the status of difference become aligned with whether differences appear reducible or not. In recognition of this dynamic, my analysis takes up the question of identity construction within three categories: transparent selves, reducible difference, and irreducible difference.1 These categories highlight how academic discourse’s invitation to remake identity is linked to how the students perceive, and value, difference as a marker of self. Students with identities most aligned with power (i.e., white, middle-class, usually male) feel little impact on their identity formation once reidentified with new manifestations of the discourse, while those who do not recognize or value difference (mostly working-class students and some of the female students) see their difference as something to be erased because it interferes with their ability to construct new identifications with academic discourse. Finally, those who strongly ally with socially recognizable identity categories (specifically students of

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color, gays and lesbians, and some straight women) seek to maintain their difference. Yet these latter students also report the difficulties in continuing to preserve multiple identifications. Most significantly, those who attempt to maintain multiplicity describe such identity formation within the binary terms of self/Other, suggesting that even in multiplicity the hierarchical relations of identity reinforced by academic discourse significantly impact the agency such multiplicity might offer. All of these identification processes pose a significant threat to critical agency residing in a student’s multiple subjectivities. Transparent students attempt to align self so closely with academic discourse that they unify with it, undercutting any sense of multiplicity that might provide a more critical sense of cultural relations. Students who seek to “reduce” difference by detaching from certain identifications seek a similar unification, submerging any sense of multiplicity that might interfere with forming identity primarily within academic discourse’s parameters. Finally, those who see difference as irreducible do seek to value alternative identifications and maintain their multiplicity, but do so within the precise terms of self/Other relations that seek to restrict the agency such multiplicity might offer. TRANSPARENT SELVES: MERITOCRATIC NARRATIVES

Less marginalized students seem to elicit the least sense of multiplicity, even in the restriction of other language-using practices. As we saw in chapter 4, the students most able to comment on the way academic discourse binds its borders symbolically are students of color or working-class students. The white middleclass students, particularly the men, make few comments about such restriction and/or conflicts among literacy practices. These students may not feel these effects as strongly because the “selves” forged in other contexts are so similar to the dominant discourses of the United States that identifying with academic discourse is not perceived as having an effect on identity. Quite simply, the sense of discontinuity between their multiple identities and academic discourse may not be as strongly felt since so much of their identity is already continuous with the cultural “self ” that need not be named. In this way, “transparent” selves perceive little threat to current identities in their desire for identification with academic discourse. Instead, when it comes up, they see the fluidity of subjectivity as the problem to be resolved. In their more seamless relationship with discourses of power, and the kinds of privilege it has afforded them in the social real, students capable of residing within the primary terms of self/Other relations seem to perceive multiplicity only as a threat to enacting power. Academic discourse poses no threat to identity; only division from it does because it strips away the writers’ continuous relationship with discourses of power. This marginal position with reference to new enunciative modalities of academic discourse has critical potential because it seems to disturb the easy

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alliance of the students with the languages they usually produce so easily. It opens a potential critical moment when the students realize that discourse is capable of both withholding power and granting it, a precursor to realizing and executing agency. As a result, such separation from the discourse these students seek to use could incite a greater sense of how culture confers power through literate practice. Their past assurance that such power was theirs to wield intentionally could be undercut by the dispersion of self they feel when unable to access it, leading to an ideal pedagogical moment where such ease might be questioned in terms of the discourse’s implicit identity politics. Not surprisingly, the students do not see such restriction from the discourse as embodying any critical potential. Rather, they feel a personal inadequacy at now struggling with a discourse they presume they should, if they were “smart” enough, be able to produce. As such, the more mainstream students suggest that rhetorics of meritocracy are the most persuasive explanation for their feelings of inadequacy. It is they, as individuals, who need to compensate for their struggles and return to a continuous relationship with the discourse. Given their relatively powerful position within the larger culture, it never occurs to them that their struggles with academic discourse could be connected to identity politics. Their previous successes were individual successes—not in any way a result of a privileged class position, their whiteness, or their gender—thus, their struggles seem just as unrelated to academic discourse’s identity politics. Within a meritocratic rhetoric, sensing any alterity between the self and academic discourse can only produce feelings of personal inadequacy. These students desire identifications with academic discourse for the precise reasons that the other students do: the material pursuit of capitalist success and its ability to confer cultural capital. According to this persuasive narrative, the feelings of fragmentation—the potential for hybridity their relationship with the discourse could produce—is that which must be erased so that they can, once again, correctly care for self within the parameters the institution has laid out for them. In the majority of narratives that fall into this category, such inadequacy never even arises. In John’s narrative, for instance, we are given a story of complete success. John characterizes his literacy history primarily in terms of how he continually exceeded expectations, even to the point of doing his older sibling’s homework and that of his friends. John even remembers enjoying the Iowa Basic Skills tests because such tests reassured him of his place in the school’s hierarchy: the top. While not all the narratives are such seamless ones of success, what they hold in common is the seeming assurance that, despite not always having the power academic discourse might accord, such power and influence is an assured part of these students’ futures if they work hard enough. Rich writes that he sought out and internalized others’ words precisely because they “empowered” him, linking schooling to building his resume. Mark seeks out postgraduate education because he “wanted to command . . . power over books, ideas, and students.” Mark and Rich also express moments of failure and frustration, but

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the tone in which they do so is much different than in the basic writer’s, or even most of the women’s texts. Failures are new challenges, opportunities to once again prove oneself. There is little sense that success will not follow struggles in a very quick progression. As a result, unlike many of the more marginalized students, the white male graduate students with middle- and upper-class backgrounds, report taking in the words of “great authors” rather than being further distanced from them, seeking out opportunities to impress in exams and writing assignments, and a clear acceptance of the school hierarchies that tend to reward them with a privileged status.2 In narratives, like Patty’s and Sheila’s, the reader is also reminded that identifications are so strong that they allow them to speak in a voice that is closely aligned with academic discourse almost continuously. Patty reports that through her long involvement in school, including her Ph.D. program, her academic writing was an accurate reflection of self; due to her long association with the discourse, “the words on the page were now mine.” Sheila reports that she has “little memory of school” prior to graduate school “because there were so few struggles.” Although the men’s confidence is not as readily apparent in the texts by middle- to upper-class, straight, female graduate students, some of the women, like Patty and Sheila, do extend the male students’ sense of how continuously they align self with academic discourse in these ways. Yet it is also one of the female graduate students—Janet—who provides the clearest picture of how sensing multiplicity leads to feelings of inadequacy by commenting on her struggles with academic discourse. Because she highlights such struggles, her narrative also illustrates how the rhetoric of meritocracy influences her choices of identification. While meritocracy is clearly at the base of the other autobiographies, the male students, in particular, presume that merit has already been accorded or is assured in the future. Given our society’s gender politics, Janet’s lack of confidence—an unfortunate feminine position taken on by too many women—apparently gives her more insight into the process. Another contributing factor to her insight may lie in the argument some have made that, because of our less powerful cultural positions, “white women are provided with more opportunity to deconstruct whiteness than are white men” (Marshall and Ryden 247). Although Janet never makes a connection to whiteness, she does indicate an awareness of the privilege she has been accorded in the past, evincing some awareness of academic discourse’s identity politics that may or may not come from her feminine identifications in the larger culture. However, while Janet’s forthrightness about both her privilege and her struggles may result from her gender, she rarely comments on gender herself. In the beginning of her autobiography, Janet quickly summarizes her early experiences with schooled reading and writing because “it was just always easy” (interview). She indicates her almost complete identification with academic discourse very strongly. When I asked her about a section in her text that discussed how easily she related to the “norms” of schooled and business writing, she replied: “because . . . I was always sort of successful I didn’t have to worry about

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it. I just figured that I was it.” The ambiguity of “it” implies that she was the norms of the discourse—that is, her definition of self mirrored academic discourse. As a result, when this seamless attitude disappears in graduate school, her problems mastering the professional language of English studies almost wipes away her whole sense of identity. Janet discusses the threat graduate school posed to her identity within the bounded terms of literate practice: “my identity as a competent reader and writer was in question” (text; my emphasis). When she talks more about this sentence in her interview, she indicates that the loss of this identity, and the cultural status it conferred, left her feeling almost as if she had none: Donna: You talked about the identity of the reader and writer being in question. Why was it your identity that was in question? Janet: Because for so long I had been just, you know people had labeled me as literate. I accepted that, I never questioned it. It never occurred to me to think anything different. And then all of a sudden it was like, “Wait a minute. I’m supposed to be a good student. And all of a sudden I’m having trouble?” I mean, I was really wrapped up in being like a pretty, in being labeled bright or articulate or whatever, and then all of a sudden I wasn’t. Donna: Why do you think that this one sort of encounter with it sort of negated with you all those years of success? I mean, why didn’t you just say like, “Well there must be something about this that is hard because I know I am smart?” Janet: Probably because I didn’t know that I was smart. I knew that other people thought I was smart. And I mean, once other people stopped telling me that, if you don’t know it for yourself then it’s gone. And I think that’s what happened. I mean I had just accepted the labels that other people put on me and I was real [tape unclear] about it. And then once they stopped telling me that; it was all gone. There was nothing left.

Significantly, Janet’s past identity as a “competent reader and writer” was conferred by the larger culture, the bodies who recognized her as one who “merits” advancement and signifies success through literacy practice. When this ability is stripped away, Janet is left with only a sense of fragmentation that is unrecognizable as an identity. In her text, she describes how significant her momentary loss of facility with schooled language was: Although I realize that not being able to write a seminar paper on a couple of D. H. Lawrence’s short stories is a pretty insignificant problem compared to the daily struggles of people who cannot decipher street signs, bus schedules, or job applications, my whole self-image was wrapped up in being the second-grader who had the longest caterpillar for reading the most books and the “young woman with excellent verbal skills” that Liberty Mutual Insurance had hired. My self-confidence was obliterated. (my emphasis)

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In her interview, she connects this obliteration with feeling fragmented: Donna: Why “obliterated”? It seems like such a strong word. Janet: I felt pretty obliterated. I mean I felt like I was just in pieces. It was horrible. It was probably the worst two years of my life. Well maybe not, but I literally felt like I was in pieces.

Janet seems to have little sense of how these “pieces” might identify with another part of her self; fragmentation does not equate with multiplicity here. Instead, she focuses only on becoming reidentified with academic discourse because it is the only part of her self she seems to value.3 Like most of the upperto middle-class, white graduate students, Janet seems to have never questioned her ability to be a speaking subject within academic discourse. As such, she seems to have submerged any other identity she has. Or, more accurately, Janet’s identities as a middle-class, straight, white woman may be so similar to those proffered by academic discourse that she need not acknowledge them as factors in this discursive relationship. These raced, sexed, and classed identifications apparently strengthen Janet’s assumption that her past identifications with academic discourse were a result of merit and her own, autonomous pursuit of success. Located as she is within the transparency of self/Other relations, Janet does not recognize identity politics, or even culture itself, as an influence on her interactions with academic discourse. Her position, that is, is well aligned with academic discourse’s identity politics that ask her only to “view” the Other from her position within the discourse but never consider her own identities to be mutually implicated, and defined, by its relationship to Others. Janet, both within and outside of the classroom, is rarely asked to consider her implication in cultural relations. Although her recent struggles with academic discourse could incite such questioning, nothing within her lived experience suggests that she should. Thus, Janet and the other white, straight, middle-to-upper-class students rarely have another discursive identification surface strongly enough to question their autonomy because the gaze they have imposed upon themselves—academic discourse’s association with the “self ” their bodies represent and the meritocratic role it plays in the larger culture—never suggests that other identities might exist or should be recognized as valuable. Although such students surely have multiple identifications with region, religion, ethnicity, and a variety of lived experiences that may not be continuous with such transparency, they have little language to describe them. Rather, within public identity rhetorics, meritocracy is the only narrative available to explain their struggles. It is only when Janet seems to lose this control, when the assumed link between self and language breaks down, that a failure to care for self suggests itself. Janet’s “loss of identity” via literacy practice points to a central part of the process by which identifications become identity: in favor of the autonomous self assured of its ability to act upon the world. In Hall’s understanding of the “excess” of identity that must be bounded and closed, for example, he suggests

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a deconstructive understanding predicated upon the presence of self as unitary— an “internal homogeneity” and “constructed form of closure”—that “treats the term identity as foundational” (“Who” 5). The difference that is marked linguistically through self/Other relations participates in a Western phallocentric logic predicated upon presence: the subject that knows himself and assumes his separation from culture. If we connect Hall’s observation to the more familiar premises of French feminism, we can also see how implicated constructing identity via self/Other relations is in perpetuating the presumption of a singular self upon which identity formation relies to close off the space of identification. For French feminists, language’s signifying economy functions in favor of univocal truth and meaning, a linguistic manifestation of the unitary self that is presumed to issue such language. Butler summarizes this move, drawn from Lacan, quite succinctly: “This language . . . structures the world by suppressing multiple meanings (which always recall the libidinal multiplicity which characterized the primary relation to the maternal body) and instating univocal and discrete meanings in their place” (Gender 79). Through the instantiation of such univocality, the subject issues language that seemingly refers only back to self. More importantly, such univocality is predicted upon a binary system of language that not only operates according to the phonocentric impulse that the signifier = a reflection of thought, but is also undergirded by a binary logic that hierarchizes terms. Irigaray discusses this move, not surprisingly, in terms of masculine/feminine. With this binary, Irigaray argues, the feminine cannot be known, cannot exist as a presence because it serves only as the absence upon which the transparent term—masculine—is predicated. As she writes, “to claim that the feminine can be expressed in the form of a concept is to allow oneself to be caught up again in a system of masculine representations, in which women are trapped in a system of meaning which serves the auto-affection of the (masculine) subject” (122–23). In short, the realm of discourse is a homogeneous one that does not allow for sexual difference because the only symbolizing morphology present is male. As Butler explains, for Irigaray, “the relations between masculine and feminine cannot be represented in a signifying economy in which the masculine constitutes the closed circle of signifier and signified” (Gender 11). Such observations lead French feminists to focus on textual difference as a form of politics, a politics that focuses on the expression of multiple subjectivities speaking a heteroglossic language. While such a textual politic belies my more materialist focus, connecting the binary logic of self-identification to our more grounded terms of analysis illustrates how identity constitution, yet again, seems predicated upon the presumption of the autonomous, freestanding subject. If such a deconstructive move is also connected to discourses of power as in Irigaray, we can also see how the continuity of discursive identification produces a unified identity only available to those located in the “self ” relation with culture and language. Only those in power, unmarked by difference, can so easily assume that language production works in favor of “auto-affection,” a reassurance of their autonomy to act upon the world.

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In Janet’s case, such auto-affection is obviously not related to gendered hierarchies, but it could be implicated in identities that are so transparent she need not claim them: her whiteness, heterosexuality, and middle-class status. These transparencies allow her to assume that her language refers only back to self and is not implicated in any form of identity politic. As McLaren has argued, “white culture’s most formidable attribute is its ability to mask itself as a category” (Predatory 136). Such masking allows us to presume that “white culture does not express itself rhetorically. Rather, the form of its expression is always represented as only incidental to ‘truth.’ And its totalizing power radiates from this pretense which is maintained by interpreting all ethnic expression as ‘representative,’ and therefore, merely rhetorical” (MacCannell 130). Although Janet certainly does not indicate that her voice speaks “truth,” she does accept that academic discourse speaks without race (or sexuality or class), and that her own struggles and successes with it have little to do with identity politics. Unlike the students whose difference compels them to recognize their literacies as implicated in their identities, Janet has no such need nor does academic discourse encourage her to do so. As a result, her struggles and successes can only appear individual, explained through her ability to exercise autonomy presuming she “merits” the control it offers. Recognizing her transparent identities, on the other hand, would interfere with the narrative of meritocracy and the presumptions of individual autonomy it supports. bell hooks explains this clearly when she discusses why whites react so violently when they realize that African Americans “critically assess white people.” “They believe that all ways of looking that highlight difference subvert the liberal belief in a universal subjectivity (we are all people) that they think will make racism disappear. They have a deep emotional investment in the myth of ‘sameness,’ even as their actions reflect the primacy of whiteness as a sign informing who they are and how they think” (Black Looks 167). Presuming “sameness” also compels us to assume that success with academic discourse can only be achieved through individual merit. While Janet obviously benefits from her association with privilege, her implication in racial, sexual, and middle-class relations also allows (forces?) her to employ a meritocratic rhetoric as the most persuasive narrative through which to explain why her need to identify with academic discourse has negative effects. Yet such a narrative also prevents her from accessing the agency that might be found in her conflicted relationship with academic discourse, and the possibilities such agency would create for understanding the cultural politics that construct her desire and position her to feel inadequate. Academic discourse’s insistence that she see her identity as unified leaves her with little resources to handle her detachment from the discourse during her initial period in graduate school. While her whiteness, class, and sexuality position her for success, her privilege also strips away the critical agency she might forge against it to understand her struggles. Being culturally aligned with self in self/Other relations may privilege one materially but it also prevents access to the critical agency students, like Janet, might need when sameness and meritocracy fail them. Although “transparent”

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students’ alliances with the self certainly make them complicit in dominant culture’s commodification of the Other, it also executes its own forms of oppression on those selves who do not merit specific forms of success, leaving them no means by which to explain their failure except to internalize it. As a result, Janet describes how her sense of multiplicity led to a sense of personal inadequacy rather than a possible critical moment. “I began to question everything I did. . . . I was sure I wasn’t reading texts closely enough, I wasn’t spending enough time in the library looking up the right kinds of secondary sources, and I wasn’t speaking up enough in classes” (text). Such feelings of inadequacy result from not being unified in academic discourse for perhaps the first time. Her entire text comments on how Janet always believed that her success was guaranteed if she followed the dictates of school. When I asked her why she was so sure her trouble in graduate school was her fault, she replied “because I’m a good girl.” Part of being a “good girl” is assuming that problems with schooled language are individual problems; thus, she must change her self in order to be “good” again. Janet’s feeling that her identity was “obliterated” demonstrates just how devastating believing that one must unify with academic discourse can be if that feeling of unification is not achieved. The discursive-material reality of autonomy both allows and prevents Janet from recognizing her own multiplicity. In her two-hour-long interview and seven-page, single-spaced autobiography, she only once mentions a perspective she thinks she’s gained from being female, the only marked identity she selfreferences. Significantly, this brief reference, quoted above, occurs when she is discussing why she believed her problems as a graduate student were due to personal inadequacy. Janet is not alone in the feelings of frustration perceiving her own fragmentation brings about. Like the writers in chapter 3, she senses that multiplicity and the dispersion of self beyond its “constructed borders,” keeps her from pursuing an identity closely aligned with academic discourse, undercutting the potential critical agency this new fluidity might provide. Her belief that she must be a unified subject in academic discourse in order to be “good,” or successful, leads her to see any multiplicity, possibly connected to her gender, as an inadequacy. Difference for subjects seeking power and the unity of identity within self/Other power relations, it seems once again, equates with a lack of value and a denigration of the attributes indicative of such difference. For Janet, however, returning to an identified relationship with the discourse ameliorates these feelings of frustration and pain. When academic discourse’s gaze is directed toward one’s own self, it is not surprising that students might see significant advantage in focusing on what most allows them to access power. Almost like a game of poker, Janet discards the “gender card,” in favor of the better hand, the three Aces she embodies. In this way, whiteness, heterosexuality, and middle-class status, through the privilege they confer, can also mask Other identities and the critical agency they might encourage. If privilege can be presumed on the basis of one or more

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categorical identities, others can be considered irrelevant to identity construction as the subject seeks to identify most strongly—in her primary identity—with what appears to offer the best chance of caring for self. By hiding its identity politics so well, that is, academic discourse invites identifications within cultural hierarchies, even if those hierarchies (white, straight, and middle-class v. female) are located in a single body. Because Janet’s body aligns so well with privilege, her sense of multiplicity is not very strong and thus does not interfere with her reidentification. Materially, she succeeds, but the threat academic discourse poses to her potential critical agency is just as severe as that posed to students who are more materially impacted by the undermining of such agency. REDUCIBLE DIFFERENCE: ENFORCING THE MIND/BODY SPLIT

While the more privileged students actively seek reidentification with academic discourse in order to return to an assured, unitary, autonomous identity, other students point to how achieving that unified identity involves detaching from certain subject positions in favor of others. Like Janet, these students, ensconced in self/Other relations, seem to unconsciously invest power in their own transparent identities, using them to “trade up” in this endless poker game where identity politics determines the value of the cards dealt. Unlike Janet’s, difference clearly announces itself in these autobiographies. The writers comment explicitly and implicitly upon their difference and place value in the social relations it helps maintain. Subject to academic discourse’s gaze, however, even explicit difference, when it is undervalued in the social real, has difficulty trumping the dealer’s demands to detach from identities that could potentially contest the discourse’s exclusive claims to knowledge. Although these students pursue new identifications with equal vigor, they also imply that choosing to pursue academic discourse alters their relations with other identities, even to the point of erasing their influence. Such a view of identity construction appears most often in the texts of working-class students and, less often, in those of female students, suggesting that classed and gendered identities, while recognizable as aspects of subjectivity, are also perceived to be reducible forms of difference. Such differences, that is, function within a certain kind of Othered invisibility that makes it possible to erase difference in favor of power. This invisibility seems directly related to how these identities are characterized within academic and public rhetorics of identity, allowing the students to disconnect working-class and feminine identifications from the bodies that inhabit them. Within our public rhetorics, some identities are located in a body’s specificity, while others transcend such specificity to become aligned with the transparency of the individual and/or common humanity. Such bodies are permitted to transcend to the level of self that need not bespeak a recognizable identity category. No doubt partially accorded by the

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white bodies of the writers, class and gender seem to work toward just such a transparency in the literacy autobiographies, wherein difference, while recognized, can be disconnected from body so that individuals might pursue their desires for material success. Reducible difference, that is, seems to work in favor of identifying with the most powerful binary term one’s body can inhabit, even if such identification means ignoring other aspects of the body or the social relations in which it is affectively invested. By associating the feminine with ways of being rather than body, and class with economics rather than lived experience, the students impose a gaze upon themselves whereby these Other identifications need not be connected to identity. Thus, altering such identifications seems to pose little threat to their collective alliances with these groups. The working-class students seem the most willing out of all the literacy autobiography writers to engage in a denigration of classed identities so severe that they willingly seek to erase them. This denigration participates in the specificity of U.S. class relations that denies connections between class and identity whenever possible. Linking identity with class presents almost insurmountable difficulties in a society where everyone is seen as “middle” class and unlimited possibilities for social mobility form part of the cultural mythos. If identities are only valued when categorized and named, it should come as no great surprise that maintaining a working-class identity is something few of our students are likely to do: After all, if they recognize the influence of class at all, they assume their goal in attending college is to leave behind such a legacy rather than laying claim to it. The very fact that students have entered college suggests to them that their goal should be to erase class markers in their pursuit of economic or cultural advancement. America’s very national consciousness typically excludes class as a category of difference that might be recognized as a source of power. Working-class identity is that which is rarely “named” in public rhetorics of identity politics. This lack of naming is inextricably connected to the mind/body binary so operative in public and academic identity rhetorics. Working-class identifications are rarely tied to body in our culture, and as such, do not vociferously claim a visible identity alliance. Although there are certainly physical markings of class, they are not bodily inscriptions members of our culture readily acknowledge. Skin does remember, as Jay Prosser describes, much of our lived experience. “In its colour, texture, accumulated marks and blemishes, it remembers something of our class, labour/leisure activities, even (in the use of cosmetic surgery and/ or skincare products) our most intimate psychic relation to our bodies” (52). Yet, while skin remembers, our cultural gaze is not constructed such that we align class with body. Rather, class is seemingly a category only of economics, not lived experience. As such, it appears malleable and changeable in ways that need not affect identity. Valuing a working-class identity is further complicated because it is, in a sense, undermined by its own values. How do you understand a working-class upbringing as possessing value if one of the community’s own

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values is to ensure that its children transcend such a class? The white working class, in my direct experience with it, frequently undermines its own possibilities within identity politics because it participates so strongly in the cultural norm of class mobility via meritocracy. Leaving the working class in favor of material success is directly encouraged within many communities. Negating an identity linked to class, in this way, is supported by multiple cultural discourses, including its own social collectivity, which continually reassures us that the defining aspect of U.S. culture and capitalism is the ability to transcend class. Class is that which must be denied in both our public rhetorics of identity and educational discourse because it is antithetical to the ideologies by which capitalism and academic institutions, as the arbiters of class mobility, function in the larger culture. One need only turn to the inability of the teachers in Brodkey’s “Literacy Letters” study to hear or acknowledge class difference as evidence of this denial. In letters where students report eviction and the teacher responds with questions about mortgage rates, one can only wonder at the gross miscommunication that seems to be taking place. But, as Brodkey points out, there is a consistency to these seeming misfires: “The teachers exercise their authority infrequently, but decisively, whenever one of their correspondents interrupts, however incidentally, the education discursive practice that treats class as irrelevant to the subjectivity of teachers and students” (130). Class difference, through the maintenance of exclusionary discursive practices, reflects an identity that cannot even be discussed within academic discourse lest the institution’s claim to classlessness be undercut. Rather than recognizing such a classed identity as a source of value, working-class students are immersed in an educational ideology and practice that relies on its presumption of “classlessness” to continue serving its cultural function as the means to economic opportunity. The multiplicity it offers the subject, then, is as problematic as it was for “transparent selves.” When this difference announces itself, it must be submerged or erased. As such, rewriting classed identifications in the pursuit of economic mobility seems as necessary a move for the literacy autobiography writers as it was for Mr. C, a working-class student in Tom Fox’s composition class. Fox’s reading of Mr. C’s writing illustrates well how the denigration of working-class identity becomes directly linked to the kinds of success Mr. C seeks in a school context that refuses to acknowledge such an identity. In his analysis of particular writing assignments, Fox chronicles how Mr. C “explains the strategy of his unwillingness to recognize class differences as a strategy designed to bolster his own feelings of authority and confidence” (82). Fox further links this denial of difference to Mr. C’s fear of being judged by teachers based on class, resulting in a submersion of his desire to be the “Perfect Student.” As Fox points out, “Mr. C’s academic success is predicated on the difficult denial of his background. He has paid for his academic success—and his attempt to move upward in the socioeconomic ladder—with the absence of collegiality with peers, and with a strained relationship with his family” (84).

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Fox’s interpretation of Mr. C’s experiences highlights a central point: the connection between economic mobility and social mobility. This distinction is essential to interpreting the literacy autobiographies by working-class students. Although accepting of academic discourse’s “classless” gaze, the writers indicate a desire for economic mobility, but not social mobility. While most of the literacy autobiography writers want the increased economic power that comes with a college education, they express discomfort and a growing sense of loss when they become aware that such economic mobility might also necessitate a change in their social connections with their family, neighborhoods, and friends (see Seitz). As in the working-class community where I was raised, schooling should raise one’s economic status, but it is not supposed to alter one’s relationship with the community nor change the person in any way other than increased consumptive power. In keeping with academic discourse’s self/Other relations, working-class identifications are associated with the deeply textured fabric of everyday life. These identifications are embedded in a relationship among bodies and the affective investments such social relations inscribe within the body. The students clearly associate working-class identities with social relations and, thus, resist altering these relations. Academic discourse’s identifications, on the other hand, have no such connection to the material world of lived experience; these identifications align, instead, with the transparency that ensures capitalist success. The students are assured that only economic change will result from identifying with academic discourse; as such, the discourse seemingly offers a way to gain economic mobility, while not affecting social relations. In the autobiographies, however, we begin to see how the restriction of classed literacy practices also becomes linked with the denigration of the social identities with which they are associated. Social mobility is seemingly unavoidable, requiring a change not just in language practice but identity construction itself. What emerges from these narratives is a depiction of students who willingly seek and internalize instruction—the correction of their language and rewriting of perspective—but are surprised by a growing sense of separation from those they care most about. Altered social relations, however, are seen as a necessary, if undesirable, requirement of achieving the writers’ desire for academic discourse’s subject positions and the cultural currency that comes with its literate practices. Despite their recognition of alternative classed identities, and the value they place in the social relations they ensure, the pursuit of economic success leads to a willingness to alter identifications with such a classed discourse. In this way, the students bear witness to how the lure of economic mobility orchestrates the construction of subjectivity through a technology of self. What their stories of growing disconnection and loss add to this picture is how such a technology also functions to reconstitute subjectivities that previously formed part of their identities. Class difference, in short, comes to be seen as reducible from identity constitution. Change, of course, is a necessary part of living. I am not suggesting that students should (or can) stop the ongoing process of identity formation in favor

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of stagnation and an inability to “grow” or complicate their relationships to culture. The ways in which particular differences are reduced, however, are disturbing. Rather than seeing identity as a fluid or ongoing process, the literacy autobiographies suggest that this process only works in a single direction: toward the transparency of self/Other relations. Identity construction is not a process wherein previous identifications interact with new ones in a dialectical encounter that might provide agency to resee both discourses. Instead, this process seemingly seeks to erase identifications that might provide a position from which to critique academic discourse’s ideology. Far from a multiple subject recreating herself with each new discursive interaction, the literacy autobiographies suggest that hybridity is endangered when identifications with the academic are being constructed, not simply previously uncomplicated attachments. Identity is reconstructed, that is, toward unification with a single discourse wherein multiple identifications can be forged only with discourses that do not challenge transparent power relations. Academic discourse encourages this reconstruction by hiding its invocation to new identities so well. The basic writers rarely comment explicitly on the need for such a change, focusing, instead, on changing their class-based literacy practice as a prerequisite to becoming “successful.” In contrast, the graduate students are much more explicit about the lost social connections becoming identified with academic discourse has brought about. Academic discourse’s effect on social relations and altered identity construction, that is, announces itself only after it has occurred. While still in process, the connections between economic and social change remain concealed. The basic writers, as a result, can sense that changes may be necessary, but only the graduate students discuss them as having already taken place. For example, Joe, a basic writer, begins to get a sense of himself as having a multiple subjectivity, expanding his previous understanding of identity as seamlessly connected to working-class identifications. He links particular positions with a working-class subjectivity that he, then, contrasts to his more “academic” self. Donna: Do you feel like the way that you write—like when you write your school stuff—that it’s part of who you are, or does it, like when you look at a piece of paper after you’ve written it, does it feel like it’s you on the paper? Or does it feel like something else? Joe: It doesn’t feel like me. It feels like something that I’ve made up. It’s part of me but it isn’t me. Donna: Okay. Can you say more about that? Joe: It’s like how, this probably isn’t even comparable but, like how a female has a baby. The baby isn’t her; it’s a part of her. And [schooled] writing is just a part of me.

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Joe’s acknowledgment of this “partial” identification with academic discourse leads to interesting implications when connected to the rest of his text. Joe was the basic writer who discussed having to make “a drastic change” in how he perceives the world to succeed in college. As he puts it, “Writing styles change from grade school to high school and even again in college. I being the only member of my family to go to college have to accommodate for all of these drastic changes.” By putting his working-class roots in apposition to the “I” that must accommodate academic discourse, Joe connects this change to workingclass identifications. It is because he is the only member of his family to go to college, that this “I” must accommodate academic discourse. It seems, then, that his current “partiality” may not be enough; rather, the multiplicity he currently senses will somehow need to “change” drastically in order to “be successful” because “achieving these writing styles is a very complex process.” Other basic writers connect this change to a more explicit sense that they are losing social connections and the ability to inhabit perspectives with which they once felt aligned. Todd, for example, indicates that he has to actively refrain from devaluing working-class literacies and the social connections they provide him. Todd describes the results of his reading and writing in school as a process of “going through life collecting different forms of literacy knowledge from people I felt had something to offer. I felt that this knowledge allowed me to communicate in different communities than I had before.” Significantly, the people he “felt had something to offer” were primarily his teachers or authors of schooled texts, and the new communities were those of school and business. Todd, however, wants to resist having these new communicative abilities distance him from “other” discursive identifications that may be less valued but are also indicative of social relations he wants to maintain. Even though this [communicating in different communities] was true I felt that I should communicate only with these new communities. I have since come to realize that no matter how high I build my knowledge tower it cannot stand without a strong base. This base is what I get from the communities that I started in. This my literacy base, is something I work to stay in touch with. In order to stay in touch I sometimes will talk as I used to and not as I do now. The comment was once made to me that I shouldn’t talk below my level of learning. I replied that if I alienated someone I would cut off my opportunity to learn from them. (my emphasis)

In this passage, Todd indicates his immersion within academic discourse’s identity politics: He senses its invocation to remain allied only with its discursive contexts (to communicate only within its communities) and understands the hierarchies it imposes by suggesting that once he is higher up in the hierarchy of identity politics, he should not “speak below the level” of his learning. Todd’s appreciation of his past social relations, however, makes him actively try to work

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against accepting this hierarchy wherein his working-class identifications no longer matter. Thus, Todd indicates that he can still make the choice to maintain multiple identifications, but that it takes an active consciousness to do so. His acceptance of academic discourse’s identity hierarchies and its ability to signify in capitalist culture, however, illustrates just how difficult Todd’s task may be. Despite how much Todd works “to stay in touch with [his literacy base],” the graduate student texts suggest that maintaining this relationship may be impossible as Todd becomes further identified with academic discourse. In fact, Charlie, another basic writer, already senses that academic discourse may alter the social relations constituted by his working-class identifications. Charlie expresses quite clearly the tension he feels between his desire to be identified with academic discourse and the loss of his social collectivity that identification might bring about. Charlie, the son of a Greek immigrant, has a strong sense of being at least two people simultaneously, one of which is strongly identified with academic discourse: Donna: Do you feel like the way that you write is part of who you are? Charlie: Yeah. In some sense. The way I am around society in general and around in classes I write that way, but the way I write when I’m me personally is not the same. Like I use a different writing style. Like right now when I’m talking to you, I wouldn’t use this, the way I am, I would be the way I am if I was around my friends because I just like to present myself in a different way. But when I write, I like to present myself for the person I want to be present to the people, not to maybe my friends. Because I think in a way everyone acts different when they’re around their close friends than around society. So when I write I present the second person in me, the business man.

Despite Charlie’s strong sense that he can be two different people, and that his writing can reflect either self depending on the persona required at the time, he also senses that his academic or “business” subjectivity might eventually become his primary identity: Donna: Do you think if you keep writing or presenting yourself in a way that the audience wants to see you, will that eventually get to the point where that’s your new self? Will that influence who you are? Charlie: Exactly. I think that going through life every day you get things that happen that influence you and you see things that influence you to make you change. And when you act one way and act another way, it all comes back into a general mold, and then, in turn, I think that’s what maturing is all about.

Later in his interview, Charlie links maturity with becoming successful and reports that part of gaining the success indicative of maturity includes achieving

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control over schooled reading and writing. Further, like the other basic writers, Charlie’s text ties his lack of facility with schooled language to his parents’ lack of education. As a result, Charlie actively seeks to erase this language from his writing and speaking. Because Charlie believes that he must erase the influence of other identifications to be successful, his intuition that his academic identifications might change him seems to be correct. Even with his sense of two selves, his discussion of how he now feels within his home culture demonstrates how his belief that he must identify with academic discourse is starting to limit his ability to see through another perspective. Despite his compliance with these changes, the effects are disturbing for him. Donna: Do you think being in college this past year has changed the way that you feel when you’re home with your friends and family? Charlie: Oh yeah. When I would go home at Christmas and Thanksgiving, my friends and myself, to start with, we’re not the same anymore . . . . We still have a friendship, but it’s just not the same as before because I’ve changed a lot from being here. And with the family—I haven’t really come from a really highly educated family—so when I go home not, I try not to, but it comes out, I express my views in a way that’s, like it’s: “What are you saying? We don’t understand what you mean.” But I try to keep a more liberal, open mind with the family, but I can tell I act different around them now. Donna: Okay. How does that make you feel? Charlie: Kind of weird. At first, well at first I thought, “Hey! I’m Mr. Hotshot,” you know coming back from college. You know, now I’m finding it harder to relate to my parents because like before we could always like “yeah we feel the same way,” now when we get down to the nitty-gritty we got total differences. And I don’t really like that.

Charlie’s belief that he must feel unified within academic discourse to be successful is beginning to undercut his sense of himself as two different people. Losing his ability to sense his own multiplicity—what he describes as a necessary result of maturity—results in frustration over the apparently necessary eventuality of losing a cultural perspective that he connects to maintaining strong social ties with his working-class friends and family. Charlie, quite intuitively, demonstrates how seeing through a similar perspective—“yeah we feel the same way”— is tied to the social fabric of everyday life within his working-class community. Detaching from this perspective in pursuit of his “business” identity generates “total differences” that threaten his ability to maintain alliances with those about whom he obviously cares deeply. For Charlie, an altered relationship to previous identifications seems to be in process, while the graduate students lament losing something amorphous they can no longer define.

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Barbara, a graduate student, provides perhaps the most fully articulated discussion of how academic discourse submerges the ability to continue seeing from other perspectives by forcing a detachment from identifications with other discourses. Barbara couches her personal example in a discussion of composition theory. In particular, she uses her personal experience as a student from a working-class background to disagree with theorists who assume students can mediate between “conflicting languages and intentions”: In my personal experience, any type of consciousness about one’s self leads to a new way of perceiving one’s self, and one can’t simply revert back to an old language because the new perceptions still remain. When a person discovers a new way of speaking, a new way of expressing ideas, it is difficult for that person to use old languages simply to fit in with the old discourse community. This consciousness imprints itself on the way that one relates to others. It’s not just a matter of language, of making oneself understood literally. It’s a matter of being able to feel a connection with the other person, of being on the same level of understanding, sharing the same assumptions that is lost. As I began to think about college (it wasn’t assumed necessarily that I would be attending one), I had dreams about getting to study subjects, getting to delve deeper into areas I had always been interested in. My family viewed college in a different perspective. They saw college as a place to study a career, not knowledge in general. . . . The language that I had acquired through years of books was useless in attempting to explain how I viewed college. While I understood their perspective, they were unable to understand mine; language had changed the way I viewed the world and while I could still use the language of my family, my relationship with my family was still altered.

In this passage, Barbara provides one of the most concrete examples of how academic discourse alters other identifications. In coming to accept academic discourse’s focus on knowledge, she senses that its alliance with economics in her working-class community does not adequately account for the new identifications she has constructed with academic discourse. These new identifications, she indicates, alter thinking, valuing, and perspective. Far from only an economic change—the transparency by which working-class perspectives can be detached in pursuit of success with seemingly little danger to self—these new identifications rewrite identity in such a way that social relations with workingclass communities seem irrevocably altered. Significantly, Barbara also indicates how code-switching is not the problem. Like many of the students in the literacy autobiographies, she reports being continually able to “talk the talk,” to use the surface features of another community’s language. The problem, however, is in being able to “walk the walk,” to continue acting and thinking in a way that is

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in accordance with the community’s perspective. It is the loss of perspective— of identification—that seems to alter the social relations so key to maintaining her working-class identity. While such a loss may be initiated linguistically through the devaluation of literate practice, the results are presented as a loss of identity, not language. Seen through Barbara’s perspective, it also seems unlikely that Todd’s attempts to “stay in touch with [his literacy base]” by code-switching will ultimately work to maintain the social ties he is so desperately “work[ing] to stay in touch with.” From Barbara, Todd, Joe, and Charlie, then, we are given a glimpse into the altered identifications that occur when students impose academic discourse’s gaze upon their own identity formation. By accepting the link between economics and academic discourse, all four participate, in various stages, in detaching from classed identifications that are seen as antithetical to academic discourse’s will to knowledge. Only once such a process has begun, or is a fait accompli in Barbara’s case, do the students begin to sense the altered social relations and, indeed, identity formation that they have orchestrated upon themselves. Immersed as they now are in academic discourse’s contexts, none of the students suggest that this process will not, ultimately, be beneficial to their pursuit of material success. They may lament their altered social relations with working-class communities, but they imply that such changes in their lived relations are necessary to gain the more valuable positions success with academic discourse can confer in the social real. Thus, the transparency of academic discourse is highlighted as implicated in identity politics, but the desire for capitalist success wins out over the threat these new identifications pose to working-class alliances. Such alliances, after all, are valuable only for maintaining relations with other bodies, not for the potential critical stance they might offer the new discourse with which they are becoming so strongly identified. Altered identity formation, that is, is accepted because of the new opportunities it offers. Within the larger culture, these new identifications matter more, and as such, should be pursued. As bodies who already signify transparency in their whiteness, such pursuit need not be impeded by a continual reminder of difference; the only bump in the road is altered social relations with a community that is not even recognized as such within the larger culture. Divorcing body from identity allows the working-class students to rewrite their identifications in ways that apparently pose little threat to their status in the larger culture, or their ability to enact their desires. Identities more closely associated with corporeal difference, however, would seemingly function much differently because of the continual reminders such bodies issue about difference. In our current state of identity politics, bodies signify identities; thus, it would seem that rewriting identifications more connected to body would be harder to execute. However, just as many narratives from women (and working-class women, like Barbara) seem to indicate that gender difference is as equally reducible as class difference.

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This reducibility seems connected to how the feminine has come to be positioned in the cultural imaginary. Partially a result of the success of equity feminist arguments in the past thirty years, the women students who seek to reduce gender difference do so by divorcing body from mind. While it is impossible to draw a direct causal line from what appears in their texts, these writers focus exclusively on the ways of thinking that academic discourse offers. As such, they seem to be embedded in an equity feminist argument that, as Moira Gatens describes it, “is concerned with the mechanisms by which bodies are recognized as different only in so far as they are constructed as possessing or lacking some socially privileged quality or qualities” (232). By focusing on altering ways of thinking and using language, these narratives correspond well to composition’s identity politics regarding women wherein the feminine becomes characterized primarily as a discursive difference indicating a less valued, although equally viable, way of thinking. When discourse and epistemology are divorced from body, feminine experience is primarily one of a mind socialized differently. The students, however, do not see such feminine difference—even in its connection only to mind—as valuable. Rather than seeing the feminine as a possible addition to the masculine nature of academic discourse, they see it as what must be altered to achieve success in this new discursive realm. These narratives can be distinguished from those of the male working-class students by how they invoke the image of control so central to the autonomy that identification with academic discourse offers. In contrast to the desire for control over academic discourse, what we see in these texts is a willingness to cede control to academic discourse. In these images of giving up control, the texts suggest that new identifications are not only being willingly sought, but they are sought in such a way that no other identification is relevant to identity construction when immersed in academic discourse’s contexts. Vicki’s narrative perhaps most clearly illustrates how this loss of control orchestrates identity formation by becoming inextricably linked to self/Other relations. Vicki, a white graduate student, connects her willingness to give up control to the way academic discourse seeks to devalue other cultural ties explicitly discussed as the lesser terms of academic discourse’s self/Other binaries: workingclass and feminine. Vicki explains that “by the time I was nineteen I was angry about a lot of things. I felt certain that if only I hadn’t grown up in Ohio, if only my father wasn’t a car salesman, if only I had come from a different set of circumstances, I might have been part of some ivy league that would help me skate through my life. It seemed to me that my education had been deficient in some way.” For Vicki, the frustration of not possessing the discourse gained through a privileged education is directly linked to her family’s circumstances. She ties her inability to identify fully with academic discourse, and thus her lack of status and power, to her working-class roots. Her image of “skating through life” invokes the power such a discourse can grant, but at the age of nineteen, her “education” in discourse has not yet subverted these ties to Ohio, car

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salesmen, and her family’s circumstances. Her devaluation of these roots, further, is directly linked to the ensuing story of how she ultimately achieved identifications with academic discourse by playing almost an inactive role in this constitution. Other identifications, she implies, were not allowed to interfere with her pursuit of this more powerful discourse. In Vicki’s narrative the denigration of her working-class background becomes aligned with an equivalent denigration of femininity such that neither identification is seen as relevant to identity formation in academic discourse. As a result, Vicki gives up her control over language and seeks the masculine identifications embodied in academic discourse. Her narrative reports that her frustration at her lack of status led to submerging these ties and looking to only those in power—male teachers—for direction. How she submitted herself to the power of male teachers is best demonstrated through a poem she wrote at the time. In this poem, Vicki indicates how academic discourse, through the authority of her male professors, sought to control almost all aspects of her identity. The poem is dedicated to a professor whom she allowed to tell her what to read and write for a long time. She introduces the poem by commenting that it is meant to show “how much power over language I thought he had”: Spiderman’s Line He’s spinning sentences like thread She can’t help it they go straight to her head It’s too late, to turn back, She’s tangled up and both her wings are cracked He’ll wrap her round and round With all the words that kiss her mind She might struggle But she’s caught up in the Spiderman’s line.

Vicki’s desire to acquire the “power over language” she felt her teacher possessed, quite literally, traps her in a discursive web. The discourse erases or, at the very least, submerges any sense of other subjectivities such that its perspective can “go straight to her head.” The devaluation of working-class identities, for Vicki, interacts with the feminine in such a way that academic discourse’s will to knowledge becomes almost totalizing. The loss of control associated with achieving identification with academic discourse appears to be a particularly feminine characteristic in the autobiographies. That the power within discourse is best accessed when control is given up to it, when other uses of language and subjectivities do not interfere with its influence, comes out most poignantly in Carole’s text. Carole, a graduate student who now sees herself as successful with academic discourse, makes intriguing connections between her history with schooled literacy and her narrative of personal trauma. Carole explains that, as an incest survivor, one way she survived such abuse was to erase the self that was receiving the abuse, to the point that

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she felt no sense of self at all except one that was “dependent” and “fearful.” Intriguingly, it is this erased self that her text ties to her success in school at this time. In the persona of her young self, Carole writes that she remembers producing text only once, and this text is a story written only because her mother asked her to write it. “Otherwise,” Carole writes, “I have no inclination to write or to draw. I think I am too dependent, too fearful: I listen and I read, I take things in; I let nothing out.” A self that only “takes things in,” however, seems to be the self desired by school. Her text reports in the same paragraph that her third grade teacher describes Carole on her report card as “so cooperative,” and “an avid silent reader who can lose herself completely in the printed page.” Her teacher’s remarks and subsequent grades hint that “losing herself” in academic discourse might be precisely what made Carole such a successful student. Further, Carole admits that she does not “write or draw,” she does not herself produce language, so there is no other use of language to interfere with her immersion within the discourse of school. By erasing herself so completely, Carole is only dispersed within the discourse rather than positioned in a way that allows her access to any agency in a multiple self. By erasing any sense of other subjectivities, she has granted academic discourse ultimate control. Although Carole’s relationship with academic discourse is complicated by the effects of the abuse she endured, I find it telling (and frightening) that the self constructed in order to survive incest in this case parallels a self that is successful at becoming part of academic discourse. It is just this type of ultimate control, however, that academic discourse seems to seek through its exclusion of other subjectivities via the restriction of other language-using practices. Again, this is not solely a repressive kind of power. Instead, what the literacy autobiographies suggest is that the process by which identification becomes identity is one willingly participated in as the students seek the power to be gained in identifying with the transparent term in self/Other relations. Constructing an exclusive, fixed space of identification, as Hall argued, also points to how the multiplicity of identity is precisely that which must be put under erasure for identification to become identity. By submerging any subjectivities that might interfere with its ability to control the students’ perspective, academic discourse attempts to unify its subjects within its discursive realm, at least during the move from identification to identity. What we find in the working-class and some of the female students’ autobiographies, however, is how this process also might necessitate the loss of some identifications, particularly if they are undervalued within the social real. That certain forms of the feminine and working-class perspectives may be denigrated in favor of the middle-class masculine perspective of academic discourse should come as little surprise. That this might also result in a loss of social relations, perspectives, and language-using practices is more shocking given our presumption of the multiple subject. Yet it is precisely what is most “unnamed” in terms of identity, or most devalued, that is most at risk from academic discourse’s will to knowledge.

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While feminism, in particular, has made great strides in terms of equal access for women, its demands that the feminine, as a way of knowing and using language, achieve equal value have been less effective materially than rhetorically: Women still know that success depends upon playing on an unequal field. The feminine, as Margaret tells us, becomes undervalued in the pursuit of maturity, of the cultural validation available through schooling: I wonder if the further my story gets immersed in an academic context, the less I am able to tell stories of my emotional connections to reading and writing. As I’ve progressed through my years of literacy, I’ve felt a tension—the tension to “write my age,” to let go of the child-language I love, and write like a “twenty-two year old” (academic—a title that doesn’t fit, why?)—whatever that means.

Margaret is still able to sense that the “academic title” doesn’t quite fit yet, but in this excerpt, she seems to fear that it soon will. It seems as if academic discourse is gradually erasing the gendered subjectivity that allows her to feel emotional connections to reading and writing, seeking to erase that which might resist its perspective. Mary’s text also speaks to an ongoing erasure of a gendered identity, but in her text, this subjectivity has already disappeared. She is left only with an amorphous sense of loss: Could I complain that I’ve been so thoroughly assimilated into a logical, linear way of thinking that it seems impossible for me to write the beautiful, lyrical, circling poetry/prose of Irigaray, Cixous, and even many other students in this class? Wouldn’t it be ridiculous to complain that because I have had so many of the advantages usually reserved for white males, I have lost touch with some other part of myself?

Mary writes an interestingly formatted text. In the body she chronicles her literacy experiences, but she breaks up this narration with an italicized intertext. The intertext itself works almost as another document because its sentences comment on each other, not on the text it breaks up, yet it is also meant to be read simultaneously with the more conventional narration. Three italicized lines appear on each page of text, portioning the main narrative into thirds. It is in the intertext that Mary comments on her loss of a gendered subjectivity, disrupting a discussion about the power schooled language has given her politically to forge her environmental campaign. Here, Mary expresses the tension evident in all the texts: the desire for the language of power and having to give up other languages and identities to achieve it. Although identity is fluid enough that these students may, at another point in time, reconnect with the identifications academic discourse seems to threaten, such a reorganization of identifications will only occur if the students are able to see value in the positions from which they have detached. Such reconnection,

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then, would be extremely difficult to achieve given how many material and discursive experiences interfere with the new narratives that would be necessary for such reattachment to devalued positions. More important than the potential loss of these attachments is how clearly these texts speak to how identifying with academic discourse may undercut the agency of the multiple subject. In seeking to unify their identity, the students seemingly submerge (erase?) their multiplicity in response to academic discourse’s gaze. The critical sense such alliances with difference might construct is lost, at least within their current position as students of its institution. There is no dialectic at work here between potentially conflicting identifications. Accepting the body/mind binary academic discourse supports so well excludes and/or erases the critical potential of difference. Consequently, the students are left with little agency to resist academic discourse’s gaze upon their own identities and that of others. Accepting such self/ Other relations so assiduously, that is, also exposes these students’ bodies to the regulatory practices culture imposes to withhold power and agency even in its most recognized form: the individual who has succeeded in the meritocracy. The female body, or the classed body too invested in consumptive practices characteristic of the working-class, will continue to signify as lesser, no matter the rewriting of mind the students have conducted. As Gatens argues, “the sexed body [or classed body?] can no longer be conceived as the unproblematic biological and factual base upon which gender is inscribed, but must itself be recognized as constructed by discourses and practices that take the body both as their target and as their vehicle of expression” (230). What the devaluing and detachment from the feminine and classed perspectives the students once possessed orchestrates, then, is not only a submersion of critical potential, but also the quite real probability of further oppression based in the body. Rather than increasing the students’ critical agency in the composition classroom, reducible difference suggests that their critical abilities might just as easily be even further undermined and forms of oppression more easily imposed because the means by which they operate will remain transparent. IRREDUCIBLE DIFFERENCE: PUBLIC VERSUS PRIVATE AND DOUBLE CONSCIOUSNESS

While difference seemingly can be rewritten, rearranged, or submerged in favor of power for some working-class and female students, the literacy autobiographies also speak to differences that are irreducible. Such irreducibility should imply an increased agency under the logic of the multiple subject, but what we see instead is the tension such differences create because they interfere with the pursuit of power. Multiple subjectivities may be retained, but the way academic discourse orchestrates their rearrangement makes hybridity much less possible. While the working-class and female students—all straight and all white—are capable of erasing difference in favor of transparency, students

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marked by racial and sexual difference cannot given the way we view bodies at this point in history. While forms of difference marked on the body cannot be reduced, ideology still decrees that a care for self is best orchestrated when differences are put under erasure. In Rajiv’s terms, “I don’t feel like I am one of them. I want to feel like one of them. . . . I like reading books. But all the books are the same. I wish I could find other books. I read more books. I don’t want the prince to marry the princess. It’s not fair. I ask my mother why the prince always had to marry the princess. My mother says so they can live happily ever after.” Living happily ever after in a seamless relationship with dominant discourses is a route unavailable to Rajiv. As he so poignantly describes, his sexuality creates a continual tension between the self and Others that constitute his identity. His mother’s reply indicates how this frustration emerges out of the perceived need for a seamless identification with dominant discourses: The princess always marries the prince “so they can live happily ever after.” Believing that such unification is the route to “happiness ever after” (the care for self) can only be a source of pain for Rajiv because he knows he’ll never identify with these valued texts in that way. If unification is the goal, it is a goal Rajiv will never achieve. The move from silence to voice was a long journey for Rajiv. His autobiography describes how painful realizing his difference from accepted discourses was, particularly academic discourse, because his sense of self as a gay man was never validated in any of these realms. He has no language with which to speak his difference: “The older I get, the quieter I become. I recoil into my self. I know I am different, but I don’t know how to articulate the difference. . . . I become a loner” (my emphasis). Throughout his text, Rajiv consistently represents “myself” as two separate words, indicating his awareness of the multiplicity that defines this supposedly unified self. Finally finding an external validation for other identities, however, has astounding consequences for Rajiv: “My silence is killing me. Insanity that would have burst and devoured me had I not stumbled upon Thom Gunn/Jimmy Sommerville/David Hockney. . . . I savor their words/ pictures. My flesh tingles. Clichés but I am eighteen. I feel relieved. I feel sane.” His text suggests that by redefining terms within his cultural experience, Rajiv can signify identity differently. Changing the accepted signification of a signifier becomes directly connected to altering his perception of the self/Other relation: I say faggot silently. I mouth the word. Endlessly. It is difficult to say. Whenever my friends said faggot, I would scream don’t use that word. My ears hurt. My heart aches. I stand in front of the mirror. I try to shout . . . the word. My voice chokes. I laugh. Then suddenly I am saying faggot and laughing, laughing, and faggot faggot faggot. I am calling my self. I am naming me. There is faggot and there is me. I am a faggot. There is strength in that word, and there is strength in me. There is beauty in that word, and there is beauty in what I am. I feel emboldened. I am empowered. I am me.

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Rajiv’s comment that receiving validation for his other identity made him “feel sane” illustrates how clearly maintaining multiplicity is linked to the ability to publicly name, and thus to value through its collective definition, the identities deemed lesser in the self/Other relation. This ability to value the Other, further, is connected to an ability to value its language, to perceive its claims to naming reality and identity to be as powerful as the transparent relations offered through a self continuous with discourses of power. Yet Rajiv does not find this voice—the language of the Other—in academic discourse; it is a validation he is forced, by dominant identity politics, to seek out on his own. As a result, Rajiv achieves a validation for the Other in himself in realms outside of schooling. Rajiv stands up to oppression by claiming as valuable that which cultural and academic discourses would deem the lesser term of the self/Other binary. This deliberate valuation is the hallmark of irreducible difference. Although irreducible because of our current identity politics, the students actively seek to preserve this difference. Although renaming provides Rajiv with significant power to choose his identity and value his difference, it does not necessarily lead to hybridity within academic discourse. Rather, Rajiv reports that it is only recently that his relationship with academic discourse has changed, largely because of the greater risks he feels he can take as a doctoral student. Before graduate school, such identity voiced itself only in contexts other than school. Further, he characterizes such critique as a risk, as something that he has enacted in response to his inability (and unwillingness) to maintain the dual identity that academic discourse previously forced upon him by separating out the realms in which his identifications could be expressed. In short, what Rajiv discloses is how powerfully he enforced a public/private distinction upon his multiple identifications before entering his Ph.D. program, revealing the forms of “double-consciousness” he felt were necessary to remaining allied with a primary identity in a culture, and institution, that seeks to deny the Other. Through his encounters with gender and queer theory, Rajiv is provided an opportunity to undercut the private/ public binary academic discourse previously imposed upon his identifications. Such is not the case with all students. For example, Mark, the only other gay man in the sample, makes no reference to sexuality at all in his literacy autobiography because he was not yet “out” in school contexts. Thus, while irreducible difference is characterized by the ability to value linguistic differences tied to social relations with Other bodies, it also seems to carry with it a necessary duality of subjectivities that students impose upon themselves to protect difference from the threat posed by academic discourse’s self/Other relation. In this way, the students equalize the binary but most do not exceed it as Rajiv has. Such valuing of linguistic difference, and the permanency of the identifications it produces, only appears in the literacy autobiographies written by African American students and Rajiv, the only “out” gay man in the sample.4 There is an intriguing contrast here between the African American students’ and the

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working-class students’ ability to value alternative literacy practices. While both groups pointed to the exclusion of their literacy practices in chapter 4, the working-class students’ discussions included a denigration of such practices not found in the African American students’ texts. Recognizing the connections between racial identity and language, the “naming” of raced identities within the public sphere, and the desire to maintain social relations within the African American community all combine to make such racial identities irreducible in the students’ pursuit of identification with academic discourse. As such, maintaining multiplicity seems directly linked to the ability to value not only the social relations but also the linguistic practices that support them. Although he needs to search for it, Rajiv’s narrative certainly indicates the power of identification through language when it is shared and seen as valuable. Yet as Rajiv’s past suggests, this is not the only story the literacy autobiographies tell. Irreducible difference also seems correlated to the identity politics surrounding the body so persuasive in the social real. Racial difference, while significantly valued by the students, is indelibly marked because of the cultural dictate that certain bodies signify particular kinds of identities that cannot be altered. Similar to (but not the same as) sexuality, race is irreducible, at least partially, because the gaze of the Same marks it as such. Irreducible differences are written on the body in ways that seem impossible to alter, while they were not for those inhabiting white bodies. Knowing that there is no ontological link between how culture pictures your body and your consciousness does not necessarily alter the material reality of inhabiting that body within a particular historical moment. As Gates puts it, “you can rebel against the content of an identity you didn’t get to choose—and yet badly stitched vestments are not easily cast off. It’s a version of the predicament faced by the wolf who would have to gnaw off a limb to escape from a trap” (xviii). Racial identifications, that is, are impossible to detach without literally dismantling body because of the historically constructed link between body and identity. One can certainly try to detach as the female students who seek to rewrite identity via mind did, but such a detachment has certainly not, despite their best efforts, altered the way others will view their bodies as invoking feminine identifications. Similarly, Rajiv and the two African American students on whom I focus in this section cannot alter the gaze that will indelibly mark them. Presumably, Rajiv could stay in the closet, but to do so would cost him the voice and power that comes with identifying with the gay community, would cost him the affective investments he needs to survive. In a society permeated with racism, erasing ties to the social communities that sustain them would also be a very risky choice for the African American students, the very risk some of the female students take when they disassociate from the collectivity that may very well be necessary to survive the sexism their bodies will undoubtedly encounter. Thus, retaining a multiplicity of positions, it could be argued, is not optional for those whose bodies our culture marks as inescapably Other. As desired

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as such identifications are because of the social relations they help maintain, such multiplicity also operates within the same self/Other relations the other students cannot escape when immersed in academic discourse. These students are just as subject to a care for self that only seems possible through the construction of identities within the transparent cultural relation linked with power. The multiple identifications they maintain, as such, are not necessarily celebrated as a source of agency because such multiplicity is always impacted by differential power relations. Tied to the social real, identities are not always subject to “play,” to a slippage in which agency can be said to reside in hybridity. Instead, identities are lived within particular material conditions that prescribe routes to power, while simultaneously ensuring discriminatory effects. As Bhabha points out in his reading of Frantz Fanon: . . . the very place of identification, caught in the tension of demand and desire, is a space of splitting. The fantasy of the native is precisely to occupy the master’s place while keeping his place in the slave’s avenging anger. “Black skin, white masks” is not a neat division; it is a doubling, dissembling image of being in at least two places at once that makes it impossible for the devalued . . . to accept the colonizer’s invitation to identity: “You’re a doctor, a writer, a student, you’re different, you are one of us.” It is precisely in that ambivalent use of “different”—to be different from those that are different makes you the same—that the Unconscious speaks of the form of otherness, the tethered shadow of deferral and displacement. (Location 44–45)

Self/Other relations inscribe an identity that is inherently conflicted for those marked as irreducibly “different.” A care for self prescribes routes to success via sameness and identification with imperial power. That same power marks the self as continually different, thus in seeking out identifications with powerful discourses, one becomes “other” to oneself while simultaneously one with the discourse that oppresses. Both identifications are real, both identities equally desired, yet discriminatory effects within the social real create the multiple subject of contemporary culture as a source of perpetual conflict and power relations. Irreducible difference flies in the face of the demand for a unitary identity in favor of autonomy. Caring for self involves complicity with that which produces discriminatory effects of power. There is no transparency for those perpetually marked as “different.” Access to power is endlessly differential in a way it is not for whites, even working-class whites or white women. The perpetual conflict such differential relations suggest is precisely what the literacy autobiographies evince. The writers’ pursuit of economic success via academic discourse does not result in a denigration of racial identities, as it did with class, nor the feminine disconnection from body. In this way, none of the literacy autobiography writers accept academic discourse’s gaze wholesale, internalizing the white gaze of academic discourse as a way of negating the Other.

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Rather than seeing their resultant multiplicity as a source of power and agency, however, it is depicted within the self/Other terms created by culture in which identities are presented either as unitary or in an either/or scenario. The categorization of identities as discrete unitary collectivities, that is, implies that one must choose one identity over another. Choosing both, as these students do, allows them to resist submitting to the hierarchy of the self/Other relation, but accepting this relation’s terms nevertheless produces a continual tension between the two sides of identity that culture defines oppostionally. The African American students attempt to negotiate these contradictory demands by attempting to separate their identities into the realms of public and private, thus imposing yet another binary relation as a way of resisting academic discourse’s compulsory self/Other relation. They choose to narrate self within the only terms seemingly available: a separation of identities wherein this tension can be submerged without resulting in a detachment from identifications. In this way, the students negotiate their discursive identifications in line with composition’s identity politics where race is an issue of diversity, not power, racism, or white supremacy. Rather, they orchestrate the vision of liberal multiculturalism where “ethnic groups are reduced to ‘add-ons’ to the dominant culture” upon their own identity construction (McLaren, Predatory 122). Resisting the call to the One results in Two. Multiplicity is possible, yet only in binary relations and through the separation of subjectivities. Hybridity can be enacted, but only, as Rajiv reports, at great risk to self. Multiplicity and hybridity are not synonymous. Denzel illustrates clearly how academic discourse’s identity politics presents identification as an either/or choice. Denzel’s literacy autobiography describes his experiences moving from a private Catholic elementary school to a public one. Denzel characterizes St. Elizabeth’s as an almost totally white school. As a result of his time there, his language came to signify a brand of literacy associated with school. Denzel is happy to have left St. Elizabeth’s because he feels his experiences there threatened other cultural identifications: Even though I like St. [Elizabeth’s] I felt that I left there at the right time, because while there I didn’t have many black friends, and I think that’s what I needed, or I would have turned out an “Oreo.” An “Oreo” is a black person that has been around so many white people that he starts to forget what he really is. When he is around black people he doesn’t feel right because he doesn’t know how to act or he doesn’t have the “Language Communicating Skills” to talk to them.

For Denzel, too strongly identifying with academic discourse equates with an identity associated with whiteness. Denzel senses that choosing academic discourse means choosing an oppositional identity to the African American one with which he wants to more strongly identify. Such discursive identifications, further, would alter his social relations with others by affecting his “language communicating skills” within this community.

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The presumption of whiteness via academic success, something constantly bemoaned by Black activists, further indicates a self/Other hierarchy that causes Denzel problems. At the public school, Denzel was immediately labeled “smart” by his teachers, a label that indicated to his peers a detachment from a racial identification. As he explains, “some of the black students didn’t think I would be cool, because of the school I had previously come from.” In his interview, Denzel clarifies, yet again, how the transparency of self assumed in academic discourse is inextricably linked to language. It was not only the school’s labels but also his association with schooled language that was at the root of his problems with the other African American students: Donna: Did you have trouble because you didn’t really know the language, but getting singled out as being smart, did that make it even harder? Denzel: Yeah, that made it harder. Donna: Why? What did the kids say to you? Denzel: Just because I did good they feel that they’re not good enough to be around me or you’re too good for him or you’re really a lot different so they don’t really want to be bothered with you. Donna: Did you feel different? Denzel: Kind of. Donna: How did you feel? Denzel: I didn’t want to be like that, I just wanted to be like everybody else.

As Denzel begins to feel more closely allied with his “language communicating skills” that made him more “like everybody else,” assuring the stability of social relations, he also starts to do worse in school: “When I left [the public school two years later] that’s when I found out I’m not a writer or a reader. I found this out when I saw my English grades” (text). Denzel’s discussion of his experience switching literacies implies that he felt he needed to make a choice between one identity and another. Although Denzel never discusses his belief that he can be identified with only one discursive subjectivity, the way he depicts his identification as a forced choice suggests that he believes he must define himself in terms of one discourse or the other. His awareness of the need for both identifications does not seem to be a reality he feels he can maintain because it suggests a dual subjectivity. In making such a clear distinction between the linguistic manifestations of seemingly oppositional discourses, Denzel also illustrates the transparency of academic discourse more clearly than any theory ever could. Denzel’s literacy autobiography focuses primarily on what he sees as the different “language communicating skills” necessary for successful African American men in our society. In the following interview, I ask him to discuss some of the distinctions he

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makes between these two languages in more detail. In almost a direct reflection of the self/Other relation, Denzel identifies strongly with what he calls Black language skills as part of his African American identity, yet sees the language of power, connected with schooling later in his text, as unconnected to identity. Rather, in its unmarked presence, this language is necessary for “all.” Donna: That sentence that you wrote there, “I’m not saying that a person has to have certain language skills to talk to Black people but it would be beneficial for a Black person to have some.” What does that mean? Denzel: Oh. Like if a Black person, if I was talking to a Black person it would be beneficial for him to have those certain language skills. Like in conversation with me and my friends. If another guy came up and wanted to converse he’d stand there like what is he saying, like what do you mean, what are you talking about? He might be more down with us, more cool with us if he, you know, could relate to those things. That’s what I meant. Basically like if he, you know, if he didn’t know what any of that stuff meant. You know like I have, I have a Black friend that when I first met him he didn’t have a lot of, and you know, I was his friend, you know, that didn’t bother me but we went around like my other friends it was like, “Where’s you friend from man? He sounds different. Does he hang around whities all the time or something?” And they’d say that all the time you know then if he hangs around me more and we hang around my friends he’d just pick up. Like me and him be talking, and I’d say something, and he’d be like, “What’s that mean?” Donna: In that same sentence you said that white people don’t have to have these language skills. Is there a certain type of language skill that everybody should have though? Would you think there is a certain way of talking that everybody needs to know? Denzel: I don’t know what you can call it, but like the language of getting life, really I mean, I know I can’t go to use my Black slang, you know the way I talk to my friends, to succeed in life. You know what I mean? So I mean and that other language is . . . why even know it? I guess you could say that is their language in a way, it’s English you know. That’s their language so they don’t need to know my language to get through it. Donna: But you need to know theirs? Denzel: Right. Donna: Okay. Does that seem fair? Denzel: No. But I mean, we have to, I mean the minorities over here, I mean, if we want to get through it we got to. You know what I mean? It’s hard.

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Donna: Do you know if there’re any white people that don’t know how to talk the language that counts either? Denzel: That don’t know that? Not really. I mean not unless they talk my language all the time, and I doubt that. No, not really.

In this conversation, Denzel shows an awareness of multiple options for subjectivity, but significantly, it is a multiplicity he perceives as a duality—a border between one identity and another that he must continually cross. One identity emerges out of his desire to succeed with “the language of getting life,” the precise nonidentity of capitalist success linked with schooled language that emerges in all the autobiographies. It is only the Other identity that embeds itself in social relations of other bodies. Further, Denzel assumes such border crossing is necessary only for people of color. The language of power is so transparent that it is referred to only as English; rather than a variation on the language, it is language even though both dialects, after all, are English. The linguistic material associated with power can only be seen as the norm, as what is necessary for all, while only the other linguistic indications of identity Denzel highly values are marked by difference. This differential relation is also one he recognizes as impacting him more than whites whom he cannot imagine not knowing the language of power already. Here Denzel makes the intuitive move from the material artifact of language to the discursive-material identity it suggests: a white identity as the transparent marker of nondifference, not an identity, but the transparency of self in a self/Other relation. And, most importantly, a self/Other relation in which he must internalize the colonizer while the colonizer need not engage in any similar border crossing. While Denzel recognizes the implicit power dynamic of the self/Other relation, he has also, apparently, found part of its narrative persuasive. His acceptance of schooled language as the language of power implicates him within the economic care for self with which education is aligned. As a result, Denzel implies that choosing both his racially identified subjectivity and academic discourse might ensure the duality of positions he already had such trouble negotiating at St. Elizabeth’s. By attending college, Denzel has made a choice to seek such identifications with academic discourse. Although he obviously would prefer not to make such a choice, his desire to be successful makes it for him. Believing that he must forge an authentic voice in academic discourse also has significant consequences. In his interview, Denzel reports feeling more closely identified with academic discourse as a result of his postsecondary education: Donna: When you write something for school, do you feel like it’s part of who you are? Denzel: Yeah. Before I’d say . . . it wasn’t Denzel. Then when I started taking that class [basic writing], it was Denzel.

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Identifying with academic discourse begins, in this way, to orchestrate new identifications, ensuring Denzel resides in the dual subjectivity he previously saw as untenable. He seeks to both pursue the success he desires and maintain strong social relations with his community, and thus remain allied with his primary identity while accessing the discourse that he hopes will ensure material success. He manages to retain both identifications by relegating each to separate spheres of his lived experience, invoking the precise public/private distinction that Rajiv suggests in his autobiography. He maintains both, that is, by separating the two so that neither his social allegiances nor his material success are threatened. Denzel makes peace with this dual subjectivity by relegating academic discourse to a nonidentity that he uses only to be successful. In this way, he can remain allied with his social collectivity while accessing a language that he hopes does not influence his primary identity. Given the either/or terms available in public discourse and social relations, choosing such a dual subjectivity is difficult, inevitably fraught with the tensions of being Other and Same simultaneously. Yet, as Tanya, the only African American graduate student in the sample illustrates, such duality is difficult to live with when viewed in such categorical binary relations. Because of her career choice (a professor of English), academic discourse’s will to knowledge is especially strong for Tanya. Becoming identified with the discourse, then, is the only route to success within the choices she has made. Tanya senses, however, that such identification will do more than simply add to her multiple self; it could quite possibly alter other aspects of self associated with her African American identity. For example, Tanya links her success in school to her new ability to “control and order” time, an ability she recognizes as an assimilation to the institution: Prior to starting work on my master’s degree, I never carried a datebook, was never on time, and did everything in a chaotic way. When I knew I had to be more organized, I seemed to have went overboard. Now my entire life is ordered including having my socks sorted by color in the drawer. This is probably another facet of me that has assimilated to cope with the career choice I have made.

Such a seemingly innocuous change as organizational patterns indicates to Tanya that her “career choice” is altering more than her professional life; it is impacting how she acts and perceives herself in everyday life. This “assimilation,” further, is seen as a threat to the racial identity she seeks actively to preserve. The way she preserves this identity is significant. She can only imagine a continuous identification with both her racial identity and her academic one in dualistic terms wherein each identity is separately categorized in an astoundingly explicit way. Tanya’s way of dealing with her apprehension about the way academic discourse might attempt to change her relationship to her African American culture is to construct two separate personas for

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herself: Tanya and Elizabeth. Tanya is the name she reserves for the self identified with her primary identity. Although I mentioned it before, I probably should explain further about Elizabeth and Tanya. Tanya is the dreamer. Her fantasy is to marry a rich man someday, have a bunch of children, write novels and end up on Arsenio Hall. She [Tanya] only did well in school to be popular, she starved to remain small and cute enough to attract a rich man. . . . In many ways Tanya was a little girl who grew into a soft feminine woman. She needed protection and nurturing in romantic relationships and friendships. Because she lacked self-esteem, she needed constant reassurance that she was smart, cute and popular. When this persona would no longer allowed her to fulfill her dreams, Elizabeth emerged. (my emphasis)

By linking the Tanya persona with the desires of her younger self, Tanya highlights why she aligns this persona with a discourse embedded in meaningful social relations. Yet it is also the self forged in her home discourse, the Tanya persona, that lacks control. “Tanya is chaos and is very happy,” she told me in her interview. Just as the earlier examples linked a lack of control with the subjectivities academic discourse seeks to erase, this chaotic persona is seen as impinging upon her identification with academic discourse. The Tanya persona is inadequate to pursuing Tanya’s new dream of a successful career in academia, so Elizabeth emerged. Elizabeth does not take over the Tanya persona, however. Instead, Elizabeth was constructed in an attempt to erase the influence of Tanya in public settings without requiring Tanya to be submerged or altered. Tanya creates, literally, a double consciousness. It is Elizabeth who is “academic. She’s the one who writes the papers” (interview). It is Elizabeth who “went back to the University of Kentucky to clean up the mess Tanya had made of her grades” (text). And finally, it is Elizabeth who organized Tanya’s chaos: “Elizabeth came to the forefront more and more and more, order and control. And it came out in ways to cope with graduate schools and be successful” (interview). Elizabeth is depicted almost as Tanya’s Other: She is the subjectivity constructed to access the power of academic discourse because, as Tanya tells us, Elizabeth’s characteristics were constructed to “cope with graduate schools and be successful.” In this way, Tanya has tried to have “the both of best worlds.” She has attempted to identify with academic discourse in such a way that it only affects the Elizabeth persona. Although she participates in a technology of self by presuming that academic discourse’s will to knowledge does circumscribe the route to her success in the institution, she tries to prevent this will from affecting her gendered and raced identities constructed in the social fabric of a midwestern, agrarian community. Constructing two personas speaks to Tanya’s intuition that academic discourse seeks to submerge her Other identities in her pursuit of material success. Yet even in constructing identifications with academic discourse that have given her

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significant academic credentials and status, she also realizes that such identifications will always be marked by difference. In Bhabha’s provocative terms, such continual reminders of difference make it impossible “to accept the colonizer’s invitation to identity: ‘You’re a doctor, a writer, a student, you’re different, you are one of us’” (45). The Elizabeth persona emerged because of Tanya’s need not to assimilate totally, to not “be viewed as an Oreo” (interview) whose complete identification will be racially marked even in its sameness. Tanya, like Denzel, accurately perceives academic discourse’s self/Other relation by aligning it with whiteness: Academic discourse seeks to create an “Oreo” and it is her responsibility to ensure that it does not. Unlike the students who see themselves as located within transparency or view their difference as reducible, Tanya’s and Denzel’s difference makes the identity politics of academic discourse more obvious to them. As bell hooks has so consistently argued, representations of whiteness exist in the Black imagination in ways that can expose its claim to transparency. Recognizing the discourse’s implicit racial politics, however, also orchestrates the dual personas Tanya feels she must construct in order to avoid becoming an “Oreo.” In this way, Tanya’s autobiography is remarkably evocative of Keith Gilyard’s experiences chronicled in Voices of the Self, even though Tanya told me in a follow-up conversation that she had not read this text before she wrote her literacy autobiography. Like Tanya, Gilyard reports using two different names—Keith and Raymond—to distinguish his life in the neighborhood with his African American peers from his school life with a predominantly white cohort. Raymond and Elizabeth also emerge from similar causes; what Gilyard refers to as “wrestl[ing] between public school values and the values of the street school” to signify the contrast between institutional and social relations. In sum, dual personas seem like a viable choice for students like Tanya and Gilyard in response to the “tension largely produced by knowledge of some of the contradictions inherent in the mainstream world of which [they] longed to be a part” (Voices 110). Renaming functions to disrupt the assumption that “white people . . . are invisible to black people since the power they have historically asserted, and even now collectively assert over black people, accorded them the right to control the black gaze” (hooks, Killing 35). In maintaining private/public and social/institutional distinctions, Tanya, Denzel, and Gilyard invert this gaze, accepting the part that ensures material success—the transparency of power—while rejecting the racial politics embedded in that claim to power. While interrogating academic discourse’s transparency does seem possible, exceeding its demands to reorganize identifications within its parameters is much more difficult for Tanya. Significantly, Gilyard chooses the name Raymond for school purposes because it is his middle name. Elizabeth, on the other hand, is a complete construction as the name bears no resemblance to any of the names by which Tanya self-designates until the need for the Elizabeth persona emerges. As such, Elizabeth seems even more of a construction in accordance with power than Gilyard’s Raymond. Despite their differences, Gilyard’s more extended

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narrative might also provide explanatory power over what might await Tanya in her reliance on such separate identities who compete but never interact directly with each other. In Gilyard’s narrative, keeping such personas separate eventually becomes impossible as a choice will inevitably impose itself. By linking Raymond to a sense of primary identity—Gilyard is, after all, Keith Raymond Gilyard— Gilyard manages to connect his identifications with two groups to himself in a way Tanya’s construction of a completely new persona does not suggest. If making a choice were inevitable for Gilyard, who closely aligns himself with both identities, it seems likely that the need to make a choice will inevitably impose itself upon Tanya. In fact, depicting the preservation of dual identities in such either/ or terms implies that Tanya believes she will eventually have to choose one over the other. Her text suggests that it is the Elizabeth persona who is gradually gaining control of Tanya’s consciousness, reformulating her self to the contours of academic discourse: “In many ways, Elizabeth has emerged so successfully that Tanya rarely has control in public anymore.” Giving Elizabeth—the subjectivity constructed in academic discourse—the control necessary to be successful in school has finally resulted in partially submerging, or detaching her identifications with Tanya. In her interview, Tanya told me that Elizabeth was constructed as separate from Tanya so that Tanya could feel that she could “go back,” but now she “really doubts” she can: Donna: In that same place [in the text] you use the terms “assimilate” and “cope.” Which one do you think you’ve done? Tanya: I guess I see the assimilation, my assimilation, I’d like to see my assimilation as the thing I’ve only done to cope with the choices I’ve made. Now I don’t know if that’s my way of trying to not be a sell out. Or not be viewed as an Oreo. Because if I keep telling myself I am only assimilating as a coping mechanism I guess that implies I can go back. Now whether I can or not, I doubt it. I really doubt it.

The expectation that she must be able to “go back” to a unified relation with one discourse and/or be successful in this new one as an “Oreo” points to the difficulties multiplicity provides for agency when viewed in the social real. When identity is pictured oppositionally, in a hierarchy of power relations, multiplicity does not seem to indicate hybridity. Instead, it seemingly presents Tanya with an unimaginable choice to reside as “self ” indelibly marked with difference or to be Other by “going back” to the social relations and worldview she so values. By submerging the conflict between Tanya and Elizabeth to “cope” with her career choice, Tanya also erases the possibilities for agency their conflicts might provide her. Reducing this tension undercuts the potential agency that hybridity might encourage. The rage of the Other against oppression—the impetus to critique and cross borders—apparently must be repressed if sameness is to be accessed,

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and the power that it brings with it accorded. As bell hooks points out, “though many of us were taught that the repression of our rage was necessary to stay alive in the days before racial integration, we now know that one can be exiled forever from the promise of economic well-being if that rage is not permanently silenced” (Killing 14). Repressing rage and the critical sense it can provide also implies a deferral or displacement of self, an almost em-bodied apartheid wherein the students attempt to “split” them-selves into two separate beings unconnected by the critical lens that would help them interpret the mutual relationship between those two selves and how they are constructed upon that relationship. Within the binary logic of identity relations, there is no fluidity, no power in the in-between (the “/” of self/Other); there is only one or the other, or both in constant contestation. Rather than accessing the potential of that conflict, Tanya and Denzel construct identity within two separate “safe houses” in the hopes that safety from the insistence that one is different even in sameness might lie in maintaining alliances with both academic discourse and their social collectivities. Like Denzel, Tanya gains a critical sense of self/Other relations, yet implicitly accepts the separation of identities the relationship inscribes through new binaries—public/private, academic/social—as a way of pursuing the forms of material success she so strongly desires. While both Tanya and Denzel clearly reject the transparency by which academic discourse’s self/Other relationship is constructed, their rejection is differentially impacted by social realities where inhabiting transparency is to access material power. To pursue transparency is impossible except through the differential relation Bhabha describes so well: Only by being different from those that are different can the transparency of the same be available. Residing in both the marked and unmarked identity, as a result, implies a continuing duality if identity is viewed categorically. Negotiating such a double vision results in attempting to separate discourse from identity in Denzel’s case (schooled language is necessary for “all”), or in constructing two separate people that reside in a single body in Tanya’s. More clearly than I ever could, then, Denzel and Tanya illustrate what might be at stake in academic discourse’s identity politics for all the students discussed here: (1) how the transparency of academic discourse invites identity formation within its discourse, forming an identity not recognized as such, and (2) how such transparency ensures the continuation of oppressive power relations where those marked by difference must internalize the colonizer, while those already aligned with transparent identities need not engage in any border crossing. Denzel senses he has no choice, while whites—already privileged both in body and language use—need never identify with another discourse. If the white discourse of power is not optional, then the only option for a more unified identity would be to detach from his “language communicating skills” and the social relations they support. There are few choices at all for either Denzel or Tanya. Instead, within the categorical understanding of identity imposed by academic discourse and the larger culture, the critical potential of hybridity is

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undercut. Thus, Denzel’s only option, from his perspective, seems to be maintaining dual subjectivities by distinguishing their realms in private and public uses. Tanya’s only option is to create, literally, a double consciousness. AGENCY IN COMPOSITION

While agency may indeed lie in the multiplicity of the subject, it does not appear to be a multiplicity easily perceived, maintained, or orchestrated within academic discourse’s will to knowledge. The literacy autobiographies indicate the impossibility of recognizing multiplicity when identity is consistent with power, the inability to maintain it when identity is constituted in discourses unrecognized as valuable in the social real, and the difficulties in accessing its agency when perceived only in categorical relations of either/or made available in current power relations. The hierarchies imposed by academic discourse’s self/Other relation interact all too well with the larger culture’s identity politics such that students ostensibly located continuously in the first binary term within the categorical quartet of identity politics—white, male, middle-class, straight—are incited to focus solely upon their continuity with the discourse despite differences that may exist outside of such categories. Those marked by differences not recognized as significant because they are unconnected to body are prompted to identify with the privileged terms of racial and sexual binaries—whiteness and heterosexuality—to the exclusion of their difference marked by class binaries. In fact, racial identifications become so strong as to encourage some students to attempt to rewrite their bodies as women in favor of the transparency offered through whiteness. Bodies located historically in difference are the only ones for whom multiplicity is even offered, but it is a multiplicity that ensures self/Other relations stay intact through the public/private distinction that creates double consciousness. Combined with the almost inescapable cult of the individual who can exceed culture in a more fixed concept of identity or in favor of “common humanity,” selecting identifications with the primary term in the hierarchy can appear unavoidable to all except those who culture ensures cannot access such a transparent space through racism and homophobia. Although I certainly cannot generalize from the literacy autobiographies here to all students, or make any decisive statements about the overall effect of academic discourse on identity formation, the context in which these texts were written provides us with an important window into such processes. Produced as assignments for composition courses in which the teaching of writing was enacted or theorized, writing the autobiographies involves each student in filling the enunciative modalities of academic discourse. As such, they locate the student in the moment of enunciation—a moment in which self is characterized through its past experiences with language, particularly schooled language. Recall of past experiences is obviously highly influenced by the immediate material context of producing text for a university class in which grades will be assigned,

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promotion to the next “level” will be determined, and overall academic success appears at stake. As a result, the literacy autobiographies speak most directly to how immersion in academic discourse affects immediate identifications—how the students’ location within composition courses impacts their vision, locates them in the gaze by which they come to characterize their current identifications. We are given, in a sense, a moment in the ongoing process of identity formation that has been “stopped” within the singular gaze of academic discourse because of the material conditions under which these texts were produced. As such, the most insightful statements about identity construction the literacy autobiographies make relates to the agency they feel and/or might construct when immersed in such a context. This moment is central to understanding how the teaching of writing might encourage and/or undermine our students’ potential agency to resist the ideologies of academic discourse, and the identity possibilities it proffers, while members of our courses. Just as significantly, the way the students depict such possibilities for agency also alludes to how they might imagine such potential in the future. If academic discourse, within this enunciative moment, constructs identifications that undercut fluidity, then the narrative it provides for identity formation obviously encourages such movements in favor of transparency. If this narrative continues to be influential in the students’ lives, as its construction of desire seems to indicate, then we might postulate that such a narrative could have an indelible effect on identity formation far beyond the one course for which the autobiography was produced. What we get from the autobiographies, then, is a fairly clear picture of the “temporary” identifications students construct while producing academic texts, and an implied effect on the choices they might make, in accordance with this gaze, in favor of identity formation. McLaren encapsulates the conundrum posed by the literacy autobiographies well: “As the dominated are invited to shed their positive identities, the dominators unwittingly serve as the regulating principle of identity itself by virtue of their very indifference” (Predatory 211). Part of that indifference, it seems, is the assumption of neutrality—a transparency of identity whose power is ostensibly offered equally through schooling and its linguistic manifestations in seemingly innocuous literate practices—that purportedly only “adds” to the multiplicity of identity through a diversity multiculturalism. It is an indifference with significant consequences, however. It not only undercuts the critical agency of our students to work for social change—to resist the very identity politics we impose in favor of eradicating racism, homophobia, sexism, and classism—but it strips away their resources to enact the care for self and others that initiated the capitalist desire at the base of current identity politics. The social relations material success is meant to support are undeniably altered for Joe, Charlie, Barbara, Margaret, and all the Others whose stories I have interpreted here. That their new identifications may be rethought at some point in favor of hybridity and multiplicity is a hope I still retain.

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My hope, however, is tempered when I consider the “end” of Tanya’s story, a narrative that represents an all too fitting closing to this chapter. At the time of this writing, she has left graduate school in favor of returning home to her agrarian roots and the community life it offers her. Such a choice was not made from failure to succeed; she left ABD with an apparently bright future ahead of her, in strictly capitalist terms. Although, as her friend, I did not probe her decision through the theoretical lenses I use here, I can’t help but wonder, given the insights her autobiography offers, how much of that choice was influenced by the inability to maintain her double consciousness, or discovering that rejecting Elizabeth was necessary to her well-being.

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interchapter five : My Blindness

In one of my many quandaries about quitting my Ph.D. program, I had an insightful discussion with a member of my dissertation committee. I was explaining why I thought I needed to quit and go back to teaching in the inner city where I thought I could make a bigger difference in real people’s lives, despite the frequent inability to do so that had led me onto higher education and out of the “trenches.” (Why do we always talk about urban teaching in war metaphors? Who exactly is it that we’re fighting?) I was becoming increasingly frustrated with this “life of the mind” that seemed to have little material result. His response was to ask me a question. He told me that if I could answer “yes” to his question, then I belonged in the academy. He asked if I thought ideas mattered. Since my response was “yes, ideas matter,” I remained in my Ph.D. program. That I, a child of the working class could answer “yes” is a testament in itself to how much I’ve changed. But my answer truly was/is “no,” although I couldn’t, at the time, make any sense of the part of me that wanted to say “no.” I still had/have a problem— a result of my working-class subjectivity making itself present—with valuing “work” (ideas) that doesn’t produce anything tangible. Since I couldn’t validate this answer—after all, another part of me believed/believes intellectual work is material, if not tangible—I didn’t believe “no” was a viable answer. That felt sense, that desire to cry “no,” even in the secure space of an academic office surrounded by oak bookcases and the texts of Aristotle, Quintilian, Cicero, and George Campbell, however, has turned out to be the projection of this book. When I set out to write this text, I assumed I would be arguing in favor of the performativity of identity. I assumed that my own experiences had taught me that all Americans have access to multiple voices and need only be encouraged to employ them. I can’t decide whether it was my own naiveté or my immersion in discourse theory that made such a conclusion seem like the logical one for this text. Yet, as I wrote, as so often happens, the text became less and less about the power in realizing the socially constructed nature of race, gender, sexuality, and class; and the multiple subject positions culture makes available to all of us. As my own narrative should have told me, performativity is never simple; it can’t be separated from desire,

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power, or the structural material conditions in which we all live. I can no longer underestimate this power that I have always known of the material and the real. Frankly, the influence of the immediate, of the desire to consume things, to meet one’s material needs is probably, if I’m honest, one of the most important things I’ve retained from my self-proclaimed history as white trash. My own history has positioned me such that I can now consume to my heart’s content and help out friends and family should they need it. It is impossible to regret that, or to presume that it was a mistake to do all in my power to ensure a financial security not often offered the working class. While I’m not sure performativity is the answer, I still believe text has the power to change materiality, to alter the conditions of our lives and how we think about self. There is power in re-membering self, in allowing its contradictions to speak in our writing. But text, too, poses a problem. When I first discussed an outline of the book with a colleague, she asked me why I was leaving personal narrative and reflection to these interchapters. Why not put it in the text itself? Frankly, I can’t. The power of context operates so strongly that when writing for academic publication, I seem to have no other voice. I become the One. I easily suppress any other perspective or discourse because I have been rewarded for doing so for so long that any other way of writing or speaking in the academy seems almost impossible. At least, impossible within an academic argument. I find myself incredibly frustrated with this inability to write in more than one voice at once, the silencing of alternative perspectives that my own writing processes have come to orchestrate, the sheer naturalness of my academic self. I am, once again, in these pages, a stranger to myself, but no less a stranger in any other context. Given the strong prohibitions I have policed on my own thoughts and writing over the years, it has taken over ten drafts, innumerable cups of coffee, and more cigarettes than I care to admit to expose as much of my other selves as I’ve been able to do in these pages. And still there is so much I have backed off from—from describing my whiteness, my heterosexuality, my immersion in the same. Exposing these aspects of identity is even more difficult than finally speaking what I could not say for so long. It’s difficult to find a language to speak the same that does not already recreate the transparency one would seek to make apparent. It is these voices and their strategic potential to rewrite the world that I must learn to access, to make visible to critique, to understand their interactions with other, more easily understood, parts of self. If I want fluidity, I can’t stay locked inside this white, straight body who can so easily hide behind its acceptance and benefit from it without even understanding its effect on who and what I am. I am, still, a coward. As difficult as it has been to reveal parts of my history, I have shied away from divulging the stories of privilege based in my race and sexuality that reside within/between/alongside the narrative I have chosen to tell here. All these voices and stories must be told. I still have much re-membering to do.

chapter six

Writing Matters: Revitalizing Agency

So we are talking about the constitutive role that we want to give language, discourse, textuality, the work of language itself, and we foreground that, but we are not saying there is nothing but text and endless text; rather, we are saying that no practice exists outside of its framework of meaning. It comes from somebody who wants it to mean something, it occupies a language which only is a language because it communicates meaning, it is interpretable only because other people either share or bring to bear on it a framework of interpretation: it is discursive work from beginning to end. But it’s also something else: it’s also materialist, economic, political, social, technological. It’s only textual because it is textual. —Stuart Hall, Journal of Advanced Composition interview with Julie Drew AS THE LITERACY AUTOBIOGRAPHIES DEMONSTRATE, there are many struc-

tural and material influences on how students may come to constitute identity that pose a significant threat to agency lying in fluidity. Yet, this is not the only story the autobiographies tell. If I have not mentioned it often enough in this text, let me reiterate: I firmly believe and have seen evidence of local forms of agency that emerge from the unpredictability of power relations and the multiplicity of experience, culture, and identity. In fact, there are just such examples of agency in the literacy autobiographies. These examples, though, are few and far between. Far more prevalent are stories where structural conditions in the social real and primary identities written onto the body exert more influence than the potential fluidity of cultural spaces. Thus, despite evidence that agency may lie in fluidity, the literacy autobiographies also remind us that students’ potential for agency does not vitiate the more structural imposition of power upon subjectivity that academic discourse can, and does, orchestrate. If the agency to rewrite self and offer alternative social visions in writing lies in enacting the agency that might lie in fluidity, however, then it is essential that writing teachers find ways to encourage such acts in their pedagogy. But doing 193

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so means attempting to intervene into an incredibly dense network of identity relations written into the discursive and material realms of culture. The task, admittedly, is daunting, almost impossible to accomplish. Writing teachers, after all, are only one small part of a larger network of social, institutional, and experiential relations in which our students operate. What we can intervene more directly into, though, are those aspects of this network that composition classes help support: the diversity rhetorics that presume identity to operate categorically, the implication of academic discourse in constructing particular forms of desire by hiding its ideology so well, and, most centrally, the complicity of the writing act in rewriting identity in accordance with structural power relations. Too often in our classrooms does the logic of the body invite readings of multicultural authors that presume an individual to speak for all members who share a socially marked identity grouping, while whites speak for themselves individually. Too facilely do students and teachers assume a liberal humanist politic will be sufficient to stare down racism, homophobia, classism, and sexism. Too easily do compositionists, myself included, assume that evidence of agency obviates the more dominating tendencies of an institutional discourse operating within a capitalist economy. What we need is a pedagogy that might effectively mediate these tendencies and tensions, one that focuses solely neither on the local, individual, nor structural. Instead, our attempts to theorize culture must see the effects of power on identity as multifarious, working according to the principles of unpredictability and domination simultaneously. Despite our complicity in aspects of this power relationship, composition is also uniquely situated to intervene into identity politics. As Hall argues in the epigraph, writing may well be textual, but it is never only textual. Compositionists have long recognized the centrality of writing to material relations—how text circulates among bodies and through bodies in acts of interpretation and action—going back to Kenneth Burke’s insistence on the dramaturgy of rhetoric, its inherently active quality. Symbolic action is, indeed, material action. What remains to be seen is how we might encourage such possibilities for action in our classrooms, how we might refigure pedagogy so that the “materialist, economic, political, social, technological” possibilities of writing work toward self- and social transformation rather than only reproducing the cultural currency academic writing can signify in material relations. Writing’s materiality invokes the more oppressive possibilities we’ve seen in this text precisely because writing functions as the locus through which material and discursive relations act upon the subject. As such, it can also lay the groundwork for potentially transformative work. While composition has attended in many ways to the material possibilities of writing, we have paid much less attention to the act of writing itself as both discursive and material. Yet, it is in refiguring the space and act of writing as sites of both discursive and material relations where I find the most hope of enabling students’ agency to “talk back” to academic discourse that has so eluded the

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literacy autobiography writers. In this last chapter, then, I point to some possible ways of rethinking academic writing itself that might help us begin to respond to the ways our students are located within this dense network of material and discursive relations that work so well to undercut the agency we know is possible in writing. Although I wish I had a well-defined “program” or curriculum that might easily respond to the technologies of subject production I’ve outlined in this text, there are no easy answers. FROM DIVERSIT Y TO DIFFERENCE: REWRITING SELF

Reimagining writing as offering spaces for possibility lies in redefining writing itself as a social practice deeply embedded in both discursive and material relations. Part of this work, as Bruce Horner rightly argues, must include breaking down the student/Author binary that helps support the autonomy of the writer, allowing us to evade seeing writing as social practice. Such work necessitates highlighting the student author’s implication in the “social production of consciousness” in order to manifest “the capacity of students to engage as social agents in not only the reproduction but the transformation of social relations” (“Students” 509). In other words, reimagining writing as social practice involves making students more aware of their own immersion in language and the conflicted relations it writes upon consciousness. It involves, simply, making the multiplicity of the subject, and her relationship to language, more open to scrutiny and awareness to undercut the categorical and autonomous understandings of identity that are so detrimental to fostering agency. Not surprisingly, compositionists have done much work recently that might aid in this process. Probably the most compelling of recent pedagogical initiatives are the proposals to alter the way we approach multicultural readings, and new initiatives such as the writing of critical autoethnographies and the interrogation of whiteness. In the work on reading (e.g., Jamieson; Gale and Gale), suggestions that we ask students to inhabit the spaces previously deemed Other by considering the implication of their own identities in such constructs go a long way toward looking at cultural identity relations as implicated in one another rather than existing in an uncrossable self/Other binary. Similarly, suggestions that students be asked to consider how the race of white authors influence both the author’s position and their reading of that position (Marshall and Ryden) could heighten awareness of how whiteness functions to hide its implication in culture. Historicizing our conceptions of race (Keating; Gilyard) through course reading could also help students begin thinking more seriously about the relational nature of race relations. In sum, the way all of us are implicated in race relations, including teachers, needs to be foregrounded. As Timothy Barnett puts it so well, “it is important for white instructors, especially, to locate our own roles in relation to ‘whiteness’” in order to dislodge the presumed power that localizes classroom authority in our white bodies (33).

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The overall aim of these suggestions is to alter our discussions of multiculturalism from rhetorics of diversity to difference. In Barnett’s terms, “such work would ideally convey to students the political and discursive nature of identity and the ways all individuals (and not just people of color) are racially located as they model the futility of a discourse of ‘whiteness’ that depends on defensiveness or guilt” (33). Extended to the politics of gender, sexuality, and class, Barnett’s insights point to how the composition classroom can become a space where the relational and historical nature of identity becomes more open to scrutiny. Disrupting the logic of autonomous identity, our understanding of identity as categorical, and the presumption that guilt and empathy will erase power inequities are all necessary if we are to disrupt the logic of the body and the liberal-humanist identity rhetorics our students bring with them to our classrooms. Changing the nature of discussion alone, however, will not necessarily implicate our students in these relationships in ways that speak directly to self. Instead, writing becomes a key aspect of coming to understand the social nature of identity. Supported by work that asks students to reconsider how race, gender, sexuality, and class are typically “read” onto others’ bodies, writing assignments such as critical autoethnographies (Brodkey; Pratt; Lu) or literacy autobiographies (Soliday) are also needed to push the boundaries of categorical identity relations by asking all students to consider how their subjectivities are immersed in the discursive and material realms of culture. Such written interventions go a long way toward helping us “problematize the ‘personal’ in its relation to the social” (Horner, Terms 524). The key here is the action of problematizing. The mere writing of literacy autobiographies, for example, will not necessarily lead to a more critical sense of the relation between culture and language unless the goal becomes explicitly interrogating the personal’s relationship to the social. I have had great success myself with such autobiographies, but only when I ask students to not only write experience but also to critically examine their texts for the cultural relations they suggest. Intentional rereadings of their own texts and those of their peers help illustrate the patterns by which literacy comes to include and exclude, rewrite consciousness, and becomes embedded in social relations between self and Other. Students come to notice, for example, that although students of color link language practice and race, white students never do. Such recognitions lead to fruitful discussions about the implication of whiteness in transparency and how students might make that transparency more open to scrutiny by decoding its implication in literacy practice. The goal of such work, whether it be through reading differently or writing about self in ways that expose the implication of the body/subject in cultural relations, is to make students more aware of difference: both their own and others’. Refiguring diversity as difference in the writing classroom is an important move. Without such pedagogical interventions into how students see themselves and their implication in identity relations, a pedagogy aimed at social

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transformation will no doubt fail. Yet, as we’ve also seen in the literacy autobiographies, being aware of difference—even of how difference is implicated in social relations and language use—does not in itself foster agency nor alter the technologies of subject production that seek to reproduce academic subjectivities within students. The working-class and female students who “reduce” difference, and the students who preserve difference yet exclude it from academic discourse through binaries of public/private are, after all, painfully aware of their difference and its connections to social relations, language, and experience. Agency is not fostered only by recognizing one’s self as a body/subject whose literacies and identities are formed in complex social relations. Rather, there seems to be something more required of composition teachers here: another aspect to understanding literacy’s discursive and material operations upon self. What I’d like to suggest in the rest of this chapter is that this missing element is, ironically enough, the act of writing itself. Rather than intervening into identity politics only in terms of what students read and/or what they write about, we need to reconsider writing itself as an act in which many of these discursive-material relations become localized so that they might act upon subjects and influence their choices about identity construction. In the identification processes I’ve been outlining in this text, we’ve seen how the writing space acts discursively to unify the writer within its enunciative modalities, materially as a form of cultural currency within the social real that orchestrates desire for identification, and in a discursive-material interaction whereby certain literacies are excluded from particular writing spaces to the effect of reproducing those exclusions within the students’ construction of identity. In sum, the texts students produce most directly subject them to the gaze academic discourse imposes upon the Other—what I’ve called the central colonial encounter—as well as forcing them to continually “reiterate” the subject positions of a discourse that seeks to “regulate and constrain” (Butler, Gender 2). Where writing teachers might most effectively intervene into this process, then, is through pedagogies that help refigure academic discourse’s will to knowledge within a differently constructed desire for identification and communication. Pedagogy needs to take seriously the ways in which acts of writing are embedded within discursive-material relations that hide their implication in capital, identity politics, and potentially oppressive ideologies so that our students might see writing as offering not only a space of reproduction, but also one in which new meanings might be created that offer alternative ways of “caring for self.” LEARNING FROM ILLITERACY: THE “HOPE” OF WRITING

Although the writing space plays a crucial role in reproducing structural cultural relations upon the student writer, it is also the space wherein the hope of social change might lie. Such a statement may reek of “theory hope,” yet I firmly believe that the act of producing language—of taking the constitutive power of

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language by the horns—is where the possibility for rewriting self and social relations rests. As Bhabha has argued so consistently, the “subject of hybridization” is one deeply implicated in the production of language. In his Journal of Advanced Composition interview, for example, Bhabha draws a clear distinction between the “subject of the politics of recognition” and the hybrid subject. In our “reading” of Others—in our interactions with texts and bodies—we operate by a “politics of recognition” that tends toward a surety of place, a marking of self/Other boundaries, that makes hybridity difficult if not impossible. The “politics of recognition,” in current U.S. culture, operates according to categorical identity rhetorics and material relations that ensure boundaries remain intact. In contrast, the “subject of enunciation”—the writing subject—has greater possibilities for enacting hybridity. The act of producing text engages the subject within the performative moment of language—a direct encounter with its ability to constitute self—such that difference might be articulated by engaging the instable cultural relations available in language. The writing subject can deliberately enact multiplicity within the space of enunciation in a way the gaze of others makes much more difficult in other interactions. In Bhabha’s words: The “subject” of hybridization is a different subject than the subject of the politics of recognition. The subject of hybridization is an enunciatory subject.// In the enunciatory subject—which is a subject in performance and process, the notion of what is to be authorized, what is to be deauthorized, what difference will be signified, what similarity or similitude will be articulated—these things are continually happening in the process of discoursemaking and meaning-making. They are not subjects which are already given to the process of enunciation. (Olson and Worsham 374)

Although Bhabha, I assume, would include both speaking and writing within his “subject of enunciation,” I believe writing is even better suited than speech to the possibilities that processes of meaning-making create. Writing’s recursive nature—its ability to allow one to re-view and re-see the kinds of meanings one has encoded in text and to continually alter those meanings— allows for a certain fluidity in the process of meaning-making not possible in speech. As Peter Elbow argued long ago, speech has permanence because of its need for timeliness and its inability to be revised, a fixed performance that writing can exceed. Writing has the unique ability to reflect back to us what we think, opening it up to manipulation and change. As a result, the hope Bhabha places in the enunciatory subject is one that writing should well be able to orchestrate. Yet, as we’ve seen in the literacy autobiographies, how closely writing is tied to the “subject in performance” can also have the reverse effect. Technologies of power and self, that is, work just as easily to create an already produced subject who seeks to accede to the discourse’s demands for a particular kind of subject. The “politics of recognition” gazes upon writers’ bodies as easily as it does on physical ones. Writing, in and of itself, does not

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incite hybridity. Rather, it can enable hybridity if the writing space can be viewed critically as a site of discursive-material interaction. The role writing plays in both forestalling and enabling hybridity is something I have learned from the literacy autobiographies. Although the literacy autobiographies include stories of students using lived experience to resist institutional discourses, these glimpses of agency are much fewer than I would have imagined given my immersion in composition theory. Agency does not seem to be easily enacted in the literacy autobiographies. Instead, it is predicated upon a subject whose difference speaks so vociferously it cannot be ignored or excluded; it is located in forms of material oppression that initially silence the writers who then must move, through many painful machinations on self and its relations to discourse, once again to a voice that might seek to speak the Other within the enunciative modalities of academic discourse. Recognizing difference, in this way, is the precursor to agency, yet such recognition does not easily manifest itself. Only through understanding the consequences of silence for self-preservation does the need to operate differently in academic discourse become a call to action. As such, agency operates almost as another version of Foucault’s care for self. Rather than orchestrating a need for identification with academic discourse, however, “care” comes to be understood as the preservation of difference within academic discourse. In chapter 5, we have already seen one example of such agency in Rajiv’s narrative. Rajiv finally achieves both the desire and the ability to speak the Other within his academic work, but only after a long, agonizing process of coming to reclaim and rename himself as a gay man of color in U.S. culture. Yet, Rajiv reports that he first had to understand both the consequences of silence for self and the mechanisms by which such silence was produced. In Spivak’s terms, Rajiv recognizes and acts upon the “specificity of postcoloniality” by “reversing, displacing, [and] seizing the apparatus of value coding” embedded in academic discourse (228). This insight is essential for pedagogy. While Rajiv alerts us to the centrality of writing for agency, he could only enact hybridity by recognizing what is excluded by academic discourse. Enacting agency apparently relies upon a subject who both recognizes difference and its implication in the discourse that would seek to exclude it. Stephanie’s narrative makes the necessity of understanding academic discourse’s exclusionary power most explicit. In the most overt example of a fluid identity being used to rewrite the spaces of academic discourse, Stephanie explains how her agency to speak hybridity emerges from both horrific experiences of sexual abuse—the difference that cannot be silenced—and the ability to understand why it is so difficult to bring such experiences into academic discourse. Stephanie’s experience with sexual abuse in a long-term relationship, specifically sadomasochism, makes her painfully aware of a gendered subjectivity that cannot be submerged, and she uses these experiences to explicitly critique what she finds most silencing in academic feminism’s rhetorics of victimization:

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the complicity of the victim. Although Stephanie realizes that discussing “what women gain from their own oppression” (interview) goes against what she has read of feminist discourses, her literacy autobiography speaks directly to the need to insert such marginalized experiences into academic conversations. To do so, however, Stephanie must first discover that it is impossible to maintain the “academic voice she usually write[s] papers in”: I felt like I may well be transgressing. But I couldn’t tell any other story really, because I tried to just talk about it, and it all came out sounding really fake and disgusting, and I was lying and saying things I didn’t mean, and I would try to explain to myself why what I had just said was contradicting something I had said two pages before, and I finally decided it was just because what I was trying to talk about was just, couldn’t be talked about in the academic voice I usually write papers in. (interview)

Once she recognizes the impossibility of speaking a “language of sexuality” within academic discourse, she seeks to find an alternative voice. Yet, she discovers that her only way to enact agency within this space is to reimagine herself as an “illiterate,” even titling her literacy narrative “My Face, Your Face: Selected Diary Entries of an Illiterate.” In her interview, Stephanie explains her choice of the terms: Donna: Why do you describe yourself as an illiterate? Stephanie: Because I was . . . trying to talk in the language of the academic. At least that was how I perceived the assignment. Basically the first draft was a thinly veiled list of reasons why I couldn’t do the assignment. That’s not quite how I couched it. And I called myself illiterate [pause]. No, literate. I called myself literate in that draft. And then I decided that for this draft probably the most productive thing would be to just stop being thickly veiled about it. Call myself illiterate and try to explain why I’m illiterate and go from there. I was finding that it was more productive to talk about the ways in which I have trouble dealing with language and language in general. With the language of, the language of the academy, which is completely without sexuality. And the language of most of the people that I try to talk to which is also certainly without this very, I guess we can call dark and/or deviant sexuality, and in order to describe it, I had to talk from the position of an illiterate I found. Because trying to talk about the problems I was having from the position of someone who really was supposed to be able to talk the discourse was completely unproductive because I found myself unable to say a lot of things.

Stephanie provides a cogent explanation here of what she is attempting to do: insert the reality of her lived experience into a discourse that would discount it. In short, she engages in a deliberate act of agency. But to enact such agency she first had to learn about schooled language’s inadequacies, about the obstacles it

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imposed to expressing her experience, and thus about the self/Other relation that was attempting to make her, literally, “illiterate.” She had to unmask academic discourse’s transparency and see through to its substance in order to realize how it sought to position her body as Other and exclude its experiences. In her text, Stephanie uses her invocation of illiteracy as a way of magnifying the gap between a self that understands academic feminism and a self that cannot speak within that feminist language. Her text tries to discuss why she feels her sexual experience is difficult to talk about in academic feminism: how the language of this discourse silences her and makes her feel she must translate her experience so that it becomes something different. The story she chooses to tell of her literacy, then, is a story of attempting to construct a more fluid relationship with academic discourse to make a place for a language that can speak her experience. Having discovered that identification with this specific enunciative modality would marginalize a part of self she does not want silenced initiates more deliberate attempts to alter the discursive parameters of her writing. A small selection of her text illustrates the tension she tries to make explicit: I want to effect a translation, to become literate. The biggest problem I have when I finally do get around to translating is my inability to explain my own role in this messy relationship—my own attitude towards my complicity, for example. . . . In the privileged language I’m trying to learn and then translate into, complicity also isn’t usually discussed, it’s also wrapped in silence, but it’s dismissed. It’s assumed not to exist, usually, and when it is discussed, it’s treated as if it were a disease that must be cured. The gap, especially the gap between the two silences, is almost impossible to talk across. (my emphasis)

Stephanie’s assumption of “illiteracy” serves as a way to explain the literacy she does possess from experiences literally “written” on her body (her narrative mentions continually the kinds of scars she still carries). She uses her alternative “literacy” to put forth another “truth” not recognized as such by academic discourse. In so doing, Stephanie attempts to transgress the gap between her two subjectivities. As she explains it, “I was asking her [the instructor] to read between the lines and do a reading of it. Try to fill in the gaps herself” (interview). Stephanie attempts to make a space from which her experience can be validated in academic discourse by deliberately transgressing the boundaries she knows it sets up. “I guess essentially in this text I’m trying to teach a feminist audience—because I consider [the instructor] a feminist—a feminist audience how to treat a victim, specifically a rape victim and/or an S&M victim” (interview). Stephanie is allowed to exercise such an overt resistance because of her local context. She reports that the course, a seminar on difference in composition, made her feel that academic discourse could be resisted in this way. In particular, she relates feeling safe with her instructor and knowing that the instructor would not discount what she had to say simply because it transgressed the boundaries of academic discourse.

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I have learned a lot from Stephanie’s narrative about how composition pedagogy might make such acts of agency more available to students. Stephanie clearly demonstrates how engaging in her more resistant form of writing was predicated upon several things. First, she needed to understand the experiences of her body as encoded in a cultural relation, and language, that helped her understand those experiences and mediate them. To be able to present this understanding to her teacher, however, Stephanie also had to recognize the mechanisms by which academic discourse prevented certain experiences from being spoken. She had to come to understand what it meant to be “literate” in this context and how those demands forced her into illiteracy within the parameters of her experience. Implied in such an understanding are the more hidden aspects of discourse localized in this writing space: the epistemologies and ideologies it invokes through its institutional location. Finally, she needed an audience—a body in the classroom—whose gaze was willing to be disrupted, an addressed audience within academic discourse (as opposed to the invoked audience of the larger discursive community) that might accept the illiteracy she attempts to speak. Narratives like Stephanie’s accentuate the importance of understanding difference—of being able to name and connect that difference to both the languages that can speak it and to the material experiences in which it is embedded. Yet, such an understanding alone is not enough to encourage agency. What the literacy autobiographies illustrate most vociferously is the essential role interrogating academic discourse itself plays in enacting agency. For these students to begin seeing the possibility for “speaking the hybrid subject,” they must first be able to recognize academic discourse’s exclusionary practices and its role in constructing the very self/Other relation they, then, seek to undermine. Difference does not speak easily; the enunciatory subject, in these narratives, has the possibility of hybridity, but only once the limitations of writing—and its inherent ideologies—have been made open to scrutiny. INTERROGATING WRITING: CROSSING THE BORDER

Stephanie’s narrative points to the central role the writing space plays in orchestrating the seemingly insurmountable self/Other relation that we’ve seen “writ large” in the other autobiographies. As such, she also challenges us to reconceive of local writing acts by critically interrogating their politics of location and the positions they prescribe for writers. Such interrogations, Stephanie tells us, are the precursors to enabling agency. Recognizing self as implicated in the social is a beginning step to such agency—without Stephanie’s insistence upon understanding and speaking her sexual abuse, after all, no hybridity would be enacted—but this awareness is not enough to resist the position of illiteracy inscribed by the discourse in relation to these experiences. Understanding how localized writing spaces seek to reunify the subject within its auspices by proscribing

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certain positions on knowledge that continually cast the body/subject as Other seems an equally paramount task for a pedagogy hoping to encourage writing for social transformation. The contact zone exists not only in student discussion or in writing about self in autoethnographies. The most effective, and imposing, contact is between students and the local, academic writing spaces they are required to occupy. Stephanie forces us to recognize, in other words, that pedagogies of “contact” are incomplete without an examination of academic discourse itself and how individual writing acts orchestrated within specific social-material conditions enact a politics of location and representation that must be acknowledged before it can be transgressed. In sum, Stephanie encourages us to reimagine the writing space as one that is ideological, material, and conflicted, capable of performing its own kind of social action upon the writer. Schooled writing itself is relational, a point of contact between a body/subject and an institution whose networks far exceed its location. In this way, Stephanie offers an implicit critique of pedagogy that is remarkably evocative of Bruce Horner’s position in Terms of Work for Composition. In this text, Horner argues persuasively that composition teaching has failed to adequately connect composition courses to the social, presenting student writing instead as a “utopian space to which to escape from the social or from which to act on the social” (37). What such a view ignores, in Stephanie’s view as well as Horner’s, is that student writing is always already social, already deeply implicated in the materiality of the institution and its discourse. By seeing the social as something students bring with them from their pasts, and not something actively being negotiated within the classroom space and the discourse of its location, composition fails to attend to how acts of writing themselves create social relations, positioning students within the precise self/Other relation that we saw in chapter 5. Writing, that is, materially and discursively positions students as novices, as makers of only authorized meanings, as subject to the scrutiny of the “correct” in style, genre, and code. It is in this way that it can come to function as the central colonial encounter. The writing space is social and material if in no other way than the action it performs in excluding literacies and attempting to unify subjectivity in ways that accord with the institution’s role in culture, especially with capitalist processes. Failing to attend to the social materiality of writing in composition courses operates, thus, as a “symbolic escape” from its institutional location, making “it impossible to address, let alone challenge, the material conditions of that institutional location” (Horner 56). Yet, as Stephanie’s rewriting of her own “illiteracy” demonstrates, there is counterhegemonic potential in writing, even (or especially) in student writing. Stephanie reminds us that institutional structures, in true Foucauldian fashion, are never simply repressive but always simultaneously a space of possibility, that local writing spaces can function, in Horner’s terms, as places where structure and agency meet. Student writing, far from only deferring its potential for social action, can initiate action within students’ present location: “If institutional

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structures are both the medium and outcome of the practices in which actors engage, then it is through their actions that these structures are reproduced or changed” (Horner 57). Agency, prefigured within its institutional location, becomes not a way to “stare down” the identity politics students bring with them from other cultural realms, but instead an act of social transformation within the very structures of academic discourse that replicate this politic and act directly upon student consciousness. If writers are to be reimagined as Bhabha hopes—as “not subjects already given to the process of enunciation”—pedagogy needs to make the ideologies of the writing space, and the attempts to rewrite the writer by academic discourse, more open to scrutiny, and thus to the possibility of the hybrid. In this way, the key to unlocking agency lies with our own subject matter: academic literacy. The use of writing to understand self is central to understanding the possibilities culture may make available, but enacting such possibilities must be directly tied to the social production—not reception—of culture, to the kinds of artifacts students produce through acts of writing in our classrooms. Without confronting the materiality of student writing, we leave students with, perhaps, a greater sense of their own difference, but with little opportunity to use that difference as a site of agency capable of restructuring academic discourse, the most immediate site impacting their construction of self and agency. While I have great hopes for how students might extend such a pedagogy to discursive-material relations outside the classroom, the most fruitful writing spaces we can offer for social transformation are those of academic discourse. In this, I add my voice to Horner’s; we must reimagine student writing as work, not an apprenticeship to some future transformative power. Given the attempts academic discourse makes to undercut the very grounds of agency before students are appropriately certified to “graduate” from its institution—the students’ difference through which they might engage the hybrid—our hopes for social change outside the classroom may very well depend on allowing for change within the classroom. What might all this mean pedagogically? It means making writing a more central object of study. It means, in short, that the topic of a writing class is, indeed, writing. But not writing as the manifestation of self-intention, nor even just student writing itself. Instead, what I suggest is that composition turn toward studying writing as a process of meaning-making deeply connected to culture, the social real, and power relations at the points of production and circulation. The goal of such work would be to make the ideology of the writing spaces students encounter more open to scrutiny so that students better understand the choices available to them when negotiating these spaces. A pedagogy that takes student writing seriously must also reenvision student writing as occurring within particular conditions of production that are highly influenced by the social and material worlds in which they are constructed. As Julie Drew has recently argued in connection with cultural studies pedagogies, “asking students to identify the conditions under which they produce text, and to then use that

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knowledge in their rhetorical choices, may go a long way toward enabling students to both write academically successful texts, and to discursively intervene in social and political practices that they might wish to subvert” (“Teaching” 414; cf. LeCourt, “Reified”). While Drew focuses primarily on asking compositionists to include a study of context as a key part of the writing process, I would argue that concepts of context also must be expanded to include the contexts in which the academy functions, the relationship between academic disciplines and their social function, and connections between social understandings of academic literacy and individualized composition classrooms. In sum, writing students need to understand how the processes by which schooled literacy accrues cultural capital affect their position within writing classrooms, their material location in institutions of higher education, and thus, their own textual production in academic sites. To accomplish this, composition pedagogy needs to take seriously its own work as implicated in cultural processes and help students locate the politics written into the rhetorical situations of our own classrooms. LOCATING WRITING IN MATERIAL CULTURE: LITERACY, SCHOOLING, AND THE SOCIAL REAL

Although the most essential critical work we can do is situated in the localized spaces of students’ writing, I suggest beginning such a critical pedagogy of the social-material nature of student writing on a larger scale. A central aspect of such a pedagogy, that is, involves first (or simultaneously) helping students gain a sense of how academic literacy functions within culture in ways that structure the possibilities for meaning-making students might engage in our classrooms. If agency lies in articulating our own histories within “conditions not of our own making” (Trimbur, “Agency” 285), then it means coming to understand the larger structural conditions within which local acts of writing occur. It means conducting a cultural study of academic literacy itself, specifically, how it functions in the public consciousness, and how literacy gains the currency and ability to exclude, oppress, and invoke the structural conditions of power, access, and identity politics we have seen throughout this book. The goal of such work is twofold. First, it makes the conditions of student writing production more open to scrutiny, highlighting how those local acts of writing serve as the nexus for a much larger set of social relations. Second, such cultural study lays the groundwork for the new understanding of self as social encouraged by writing and critically reading literacy narratives and autoethnographies that I have argued are the key starting point of a pedagogy seeking to activate the agency of the multiple, conflicted subject. In this way, pedagogy focuses neither on the self nor the social, but on their interrelationships. As Charles Paine has argued, “our students come to us packed full of cultural conflict” (195). As such, “the study of culture as it manifests itself

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within our students can be our unique contribution to cultural studies” (Paine 195). Yet, such study, situated only within the students’ subjectivities risks the possibility of critical work resting solely with the relationship between the self and the social that our students bring with them to our classrooms. Without an attendant examination of how the body/subject—as the locus of self/social— interacts with what McLaren has called “the constitutive outside” in which it is embedded, such critical work could easily elevate the personal to an individualized act that, while constructed through the social, is not also constantly interacting with larger systemic relations. Relying overly much on difference within the subject as the key to agency is something, in fact, that McLaren has, quite rightly, criticized my earlier work for, accusing me of an overly “ludic” mode of theorizing that reduces critical work to the discursive and power to discursive causality (McLaren, “Beyond” 43; LeCourt, “Reified”). Without a local/systemic connection to culture, writing difference could too easily be co-opted as yet another celebration of fragmentation and difference for its own sake, and thus be easily accommodated by the multinational consumerism and postmodern culture for which such an alienated and permeable subject is so well suited. Rather, a link between the local and the systemic—in McLaren’s terms, between the “difference within” and “difference in relation”—is necessary if students are to see academic writing as a site of literacy with both material and discursive effects. Studying how schooled literacy positions students within the student/Author binary, subjecting them to the material results of the “uninitiated” and the presumed material effects of becoming “initiated,” then, becomes a key counterpoint to the new understanding of self encouraged by writing about experience as social. As Stephanie has shown us, perhaps the most central relationship between self/Other that pedagogy can highlight is the one between the writer, as a multiple body/subject fluidly interacting with culture, and the more unified subjectivity of “student” that academic discourse seeks to inscribe. While acts of agency are only possible within the local spaces of text production in particular classrooms, with particular teachers, and in particular institutions, an appreciation for how academic discourse seeks to position the “self ” as the One can enhance an understanding of multiplicity as that which must be animated in defiance of the systemic relations inherent in the institution in which the subject currently must take action. A cultural studies perspective on academic literacy, thus, would seek to illuminate how writing spaces become as ideological as the reading spaces cultural studies pedagogies usually attend to more closely. It attempts to animate for and with students how closely tied acts of consumption are to the production of texts. Such a pedagogy resituates writing, in Berlin’s terms, as a practice that requires “knowledge of semiotic codes in which versions of economic, social, and political predispositions are inscribed,” and aims toward an understanding of how individual student acts of writing are “always responses to the material and social formations of a particular moment” (Rhetorics 86, 87).

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Agency is an act of specificity, a strategic maneuver upon a particular aspect of a discursive technology that would seek to exclude the experiences/languages of the body/subject. Strategizing, as a result, must involve understanding the multiple ways in which the discourse one seeks to resist might be positioning a particular aspect of self that one wants to engage. Without Stephanie’s understanding, specifically, of the exclusions put forth by academic feminism (not all academic discourse, but this one particular manifestation), speaking the hybrid, she implies, would be impossible. As such, I suggest that a pedagogy aimed at making such strategies available to students should begin by encouraging a larger sense of how academic discourse works within students’ material experiences of the public, the institution, their majors, and the classrooms in which they find themselves. What such projects can do is help make the “space of production” more open to scrutiny in ways cultural studies work in composition points toward, but rarely does with student writing itself. One way of getting into these questions of schooled literacy’s cultural currency is to begin by examining how this literacy obtains such power and how the larger public views this form of literacy and its uses. Such analyses, then, can serve as a backdrop through which students can examine what aspects of this public rhetoric they have come to find internally persuasive. In my own classes, we have attempted to begin such a study by employing Deborah Brandt’s concept of “literacy sponsorship,” looking to how the media “sponsors” literacy by attempting to influence our understandings of how it can and should function. To get at these questions, I converted a previous assignment that asked students to analyze a television show for the kinds of thinking it was attempting to inscribe and how people “took up” those meanings as part of their everyday life; in short, a fairly classic cultural studies assignment. Rather than directing their critical lens toward sitcoms and dramas, the new assignment asks them to critically interrogate the media’s coverage of a public debate about literacy from a similar vantage point (e.g., school testing, Ebonics, censorship of music, calls of “literacy crises,” etc.). When students first begin collecting articles, they are surprised to discover how literacy seems to serve as a nexus around which many of our society’s hot topics circulate. That is, they begin to see how assumptions about literacy become almost a metonym for other social issues including those of identity politics, economics, nationalism, and even morality. Further, supported by readings on multiple literacies in U.S. culture (e.g., Moss; Heath; McLaughlin), students begin to see how discussions of literacy presume there to be only one form of literacy—one dialect, one form of writing linked to schooling—that undergirds the social effects literacy is presumed to have. They begin to assess the connection between schooled literacy and the kinds of social benefits thought to accrue from such literacy by examining discussions of the loss of economic competition blamed on lower literacy rates and the lack of participation in democracy blamed on lack of adequate schooling and literacy. These initial

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analyses prompt students to speculate on the connections among the established media, its representations of what forms of language are necessary to achieve voice, and what views get represented in the media itself. More specifically, such analyses serve to highlight the ways in which discussions of literacy tend to support dominant ideologies of who might speak, in what form, and how other voices become excluded. Their projects, then, take a variety of forms, but in each case students come to the conclusion that the dominant definitions of literacy put forth in the popular press are usually symptomatic of larger cultural issues. In short, they begin to discover how presumptions about what literacy is and can do, and how it is sponsored and by whom, leads to both cultural change and oppressive power relations. For some, these projects help expose the racial nature of literacy practices and literacy’s connections to corporate sponsorship. For example, Sarah’s analysis of the media’s coverage on whether rap should be censored comes to the conclusion that rap censorship “is a way to extinguish something the primary culture fears. The overall impression I got from these articles is that rap music is a scapegoat. If one reads further into the articles, one could note racism, power struggles, and the need to ‘remain’ normal to majority standards.” Judy’s paper makes a direct connection between the racial politics of literacy and schooling. Judy, originally against bilingual education, writes an analysis that specifies what she finds as recurring themes present in arguments about bilingual education— national unity, preserving the cultural identity of Spanish-speakers, and the us versus them separatist rhetoric of these arguments that lead to ethnic conflict— to analyze the presumed educational benefits and detriments of bilingual teaching. From her analysis, Judy concludes that bilingual education arguments function according to “hidden ideologies,” and thus mask racist assumptions about class structures and access in our society. “Keeping the ESL contingency ‘in their place’ allows for the status quo to continue and perpetuate,” she concludes. Finally, Lisa, after analyzing articles on standardized testing, comes to realize, in her words, that literacy standards only serve to support the meritocracy, ironically asking how much “disarray society would be in if the low-income districts started scoring better than the affluent ones.” None of these insights are all that startling to those of us used to inquiring into the political and ideological ramifications of how literacy is defined, monitored, and controlled. But, for these students, realizing how often people become silenced by literacy’s inextricable connection to schooling and the way voice is gained only through corporate and institutional sponsorship illustrates a connection between market forces, labor, capital, and literacy in a way no academic reading on the function of school, so popular in many cultural composition readers, ever could. Most importantly, students begin to see the ways in which schooled literacy is subjected to a variety of economic and social factors, exposing its role in capitalism through meritocracy, the economic benefits thought to accrue to those appropriately literate, and the identity politics inherent in the

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kind of literacy most valorized in the public media. In this way, through their own investigations, students come to see how language, in its material function as part of the social, serves as a “marker” of difference, privilege, and the “reality” upon which hierarchical relations of power are orchestrated. Literacy, that is, comes to be seen as a material element within the social, especially in the projects that recognize the designation of Other performed by a systemic relation linked to “literacy standards.” I offer my project as one possible way to make the power relations within public discourse on literacy more available to student scrutiny, but the specific nature such projects might take is unimportant. More central is how such literacy study highlights the larger social relations in which academic writing practices are embedded, providing a necessary context for a pedagogy focused on the social-material nature of student writing. In particular, such cultural study offers students a way to situate their own interactions with schooled literacy within a larger social nexus about the presumed function and value of this kind of literacy. Contextualizing academic literacy in this way affords pedagogy the opportunity to better connect the self and the social, to situate students’ interactions with schooled literacy within the social real and the ideologies by which such literacies gain so much currency. In my classes, for example, I have used such projects as a counterpoint for the more personal explorations of literacy’s effects that the students construct in literacy autobiographies and autoethnographies. Typically, students in my classes may have already produced a draft of a literacy autobiography before this project. A subsequent revision of this initial literacy autobiography, through the lens of their analyses of public literacy debates, then produces a much different sense of how their own histories with schooled literacy, both their failures and their desires for success, might be connected to larger systemic structures wherein literacy becomes linked to class, race, and meritocracy. Through such revisions and class workshops, students begin to look for the potentially marginalizing and silencing effects of schooled literacy on their other forms of experience. Combined with the work on whiteness and multiple literacies also taking place in class, students are encouraged to see how initial presumptions about the “neutrality” of writing need to be reviewed in light of literacy’s material function. Not all students, of course, resee their literacy histories in these ways. I have no desire to construct, yet again, a vision of the generic student for whom my pedagogy is always successful. Instead, what I would like to highlight is the importance of looking at students’ literacy histories relationally, in this case in relation to public conceptions about literacy, identity, and economics. Taking up the challenge such a vision might offer, however, is most effective when it is more closely tied to the students’ immediate situations in higher education. Gaining an understanding of the larger social contexts in which local acts of writing are situated, then, also includes attending to the kinds of writing students may be asked to produce by asking why certain genres, styles, and audiences play

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such a central role in academic disciplines. Thus, excavating the social forces affecting student writing might also include a close study of the disciplinary links between writing and epistemology. Extending cultural study of literate practice to students’ majors, in particular, can serve a dual purpose. Such study makes the “norms” of disciplinary writing explicit, in accordance with composition’s service function, but it does so in such a way that students can also consider the ideological work these norms perform by controlling the production of knowledge and its expression in ways that accrue cultural capital in the social real. On this topic, I have had success with a more limited assignment that asks students to collect writing assignments, samples of student and professional work, and to conduct interviews with instructors about writing in order to assess the norms for writing in their majors. Similar to much writing-across-thecurriculum work that asks students to investigate and discover the norms of the disciplinary communities they are attempting to enter, this project asks students to consider disciplinary discourses as a site of cultural study itself. In this assignment, students are asked to investigate disciplinary discourses not from the perspective of the “uninitiated attempting to enter the discourse,” but as cultural critics of how literacy functions in relation to knowledge in their major. As such, students are asked to investigate disciplinary discourses critically, with an eye toward what the discipline’s rhetorical practices include and exclude in terms of knowledge. In sum, this project looks closely at the discursive construction of reality and epistemology inherent in literate practice so that students might, yet again, critically analyze the ideologies implicitly offered to them if they accede to the discursive demands of a particular discipline (see LeCourt, “WAC”). By locating the study of writing’s social function more firmly within the academy, such projects offer students insight into the effects of context and institutional norms on their own thinking. The goal of such work is to highlight both the social function of genre in relationship to disciplinary knowledge (Huckin and Berkenkotter) and the influence writing such texts for disciplinary audiences might have on the kinds of thinking they allow. Asking students to consider the literacy-reality connection, that is, helps expose how literacy practices, in certain disciplinary contexts, also proffer certain positions that may be taken on the topics written about, thus limiting the kinds of thinking and experience they might bring to their perspectives on disciplinary objects of knowledge. This kind of critical work, however, inquires primarily into the discursive means by which students are positioned by academic discourse. Interrogating the contexts of academic discourse, as a result, must also be paired with more material analyses of how the institution positions students themselves as “learners” rather than constructors of knowledge if writers are to see any possibilities for action within the writing spaces they are asked to occupy as students. To help illustrate the dynamics of how classrooms, as material sites of literacy production, attempt to control meaning-making, I have also experimented with altering yet another

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assignment from my cultural studies repertoire. This project was originally prefigured as an investigation of literacy’s material effects through microethnographies of literate practice. Students were asked to conduct their own qualitative research into the literate practice of an institution or community to which they belong and to look for ways in which literacy both reproduces ideology and makes spaces available where such ideologies might be questioned. Some students, on their own, used this project to investigate the community of their other classes. Such analyses led to examinations of curriculum in a history class on civil rights that neglected the American Indian movement. Others looked more closely at student-teacher interaction, discovering, in one case, the implicit power dynamics in an ostensibly student-centered course. This latter student discovered how seemingly “open discussions” and paper topics were actually controlled by the teacher deliberately through the forms of questions and parameters for writing he set up. Another student looked more closely at student interactions with the curriculum, noting how students complained in interviews about all the books they had to read by “too many women and Blacks,” but never commented on the overwhelming number of readings of work by white men. Another examined her German class, discovering how her instructor’s insistence on one particular German dialect repositioned students, already bilingual in German, as novices rather than experts. In particular, she looked closely at how the text, quizzes, and exams allowed for no expression of the alternative German dialects these students knew existed, and in fact, had more facility with than the instructor. By initiating such classroom analyses on their own, my students have shown me how powerful such microethnographies might be in helping students understand the material influence of academic literacy practices on the kinds of knowledge that might be made in local classroom spaces. Those of my students who have conducted such analyses gained a heightened understanding of how the “novice” position of the student writer is created, how students and teachers construct classroom spaces such that authority is hidden and knowledge implicitly excluded, and how writing assignments encode epistemology. Connected to studies of academic literacy, both internally in disciplines and externally in the public sphere, these microethnographies might also lead to a stronger critical sense of how schooled literacy functions within their local experience. As such, they provide direction for the kinds of analyses that should be applied to our own writing classrooms. If we want to help students inquire into the material influence of context on their own writing practices, that is, a social-material pedagogy must also engage students in reading the power dynamics of our own classrooms, including our teacher-authority, and the materials, readings, and assignments we ask them to interact with. Although I have only begun to experiment with turning this lens on my own practice, initial attempts have been promising. Through critiques of the identity politics of course readings, for example, students come to see how my own classroom attempts to position identity in particular ways. Similarly, opening up discussion of how student and

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published writing suggest certain kinds of “gendership” to their readers (see Haswell and Haswell), imply the race of an author through the stance he takes and languages he uses, and/or intimate a heterosexual orientation on experience can make the implicit identity politics of academic textuality more open to examination. The “reading” my students have offered of my own female body, in a similar way, has unearthed unexpected assumptions about how I should not only act but also respond to both their writing and their needs. As these examples illustrate, how students might read our own classroom spaces critically can take a variety of directions. The specificities of practice aside, what is more central is how such readings might aid students in applying their sense of how literate acts can serve as social-material sites of power to their own material situations as students in specific composition classrooms. Such work serves as the grounding for the more specific study of writing and writing processes we might conduct wherein individual acts of writing come to be seen as social acts of meaning-making occurring within a broader relationship to other disciplines, the academic institution, and how schooled literacy functions within the larger culture. By constructing assignments that ask students to become cultural critics of literacy, we lay the foundation for helping them reimagine their potential agency as students. FROM THE SYSTEMIC TO THE LOCAL: INTERROGATING STUDENT WRITING PRODUCTION

Cultural critiques, while important to the kind of pedagogy I am encouraging here, rarely encourage agency on their own. Rather, students just as often will find such analyses an invitation to participate more facilely in the meritocracy they still desire, or more often, see little option for negotiating these spaces differently. Unlike the microethnographies of communities my students participate in outside of school, students who performed classroom analyses had little sense that they had the power or ability to refigure academic writing spaces. In public community projects, students reported trying to alter the literacy/power relationship they unearthed. One student, for example, tried to change the dynamics of a Baptist bible study group after discovering how the interpretative practices of this group were not as “open” as he originally had thought, but were, instead, located directly in the group’s leader, who took his direction from the minister, who understood his role directly from church doctrine. Another rewrote the forms at the group home for mentally disabled adults where she worked in order to more situationally describe behavior, undercutting the objectification of her clients through medical categories. While such social action seemed a natural extension of community analysis, students who made similar discoveries about how classroom literacy practices encoded potentially oppressive power relations suggested no possible ways of altering these relationships. Instead, these students seemed to see themselves as having little authority to enact

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change in the ways others attempted to do in their churches and workplaces, where they were more obviously given a more authoritative role. Connecting literacy and schooling, through cultural analysis, sets up an understanding of academic discourse in its connections to the social real, the academic institution, and individual disciplines. Yet such agency can only occur in local spaces of writing—through student understanding of the politics of those spaces—and the invocations to subjectivity they offer. As a result, a pedagogy that seeks to make the writing space open to critical scrutiny and agency must also involve the students more directly at the site of their own production: the rhetorical situations they are asked to occupy in their local acts of textual production. If our goal is to make students more aware of the rhetorical choices open to them so that writing might better enact the agency that lies in the difference they bring to the writing act, then critical scrutiny needs to be applied most rigorously to the space of writing production itself. Refiguring pedagogy in this way, however, necessitates rethinking the role context and process play in the writing act. As such, it involves finding ways to analyze local writing spaces and connect these more individualized acts of production to the larger social forces explicated in cultural studies projects. Further, it entails helping students to understand writing itself as a process of meaning-making that involves acceding to and taking action upon these social forces as they are localized within the writing space. Pedagogically, this means finding ways of making both the writing context itself and its effects on students’ writing and thinking more open to critical scrutiny. As I have suggested elsewhere, technological writing spaces might offer one entry into these questions because they allow us to look into the ideology of language use in microcosm, replete with all the social and academic influences such texts replicate and challenge (see LeCourt, “Critical”). Analyzing these textual spaces as part of a critical composition pedagogy can help foreground how discourse attempts to position writers as purveyors of its ideology. The advantage of technological spaces is that they present context back to the students in the form of others’ contributions to the discussion. As a result, we might use forums, listservs, and chats as sites of critical study wherein students can analyze how their own contributions to discussion were affected by others’, by the site of the classroom itself, and by their conceptions about acceptable and unacceptable writing in school. The pace of realtime chat, for example, is ideal for such inquiries because it allows students to analyze why discussion topics changed (i.e., what other students found most persuasive) in terms of the internal dynamics of the classroom, its institutional situation, and the external influences that provide more currency to certain cultural positions. More extended forms of discussion, like forums and listservs, provide a picture of a developing discourse community that students can then analyze for the norms it creates for itself, how those norms reflect/question their assumptions about style, genre, and perspective in other academic writing in the class, and, most important, how

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those assumptions affected their own contributions to the discussion. Such analyses highlight, in microcosm, the processes by which students’ own writing emerges from the contexts in which it is produced. The most essential site of study, however, is the writing students produce for a grade if for no other reason than such evaluation invokes many of their presumptions about the meritocratic function of school so key to enacting desire for identification with academic discourse. As such, critical scrutiny of the writing space must also attend to how “formal” assignments invoke the many levels of context I have been discussing here: the local classroom, the institution’s control of knowledge and authority, and the cultural relations in which the institution is embedded. The goal of such inquiry would be to make the socialmaterial relations of the writing space open to both discursive and material analysis. Discursively, students would be encouraged to understand how these localized acts of writing attempt to inscribe the appropriate perspectives that might be taken on their topics, the limitations on knowledge intrinsic to the genres and styles proscribed, the inherent identity politics of such perspectives and literate acts, and the exclusions the writing space, as a result, attempts to force upon their experience. In short, such scrutiny would serve to make the limited choices a rhetorical situation makes available open to questioning in terms of what other choices it excludes and what other forms of knowledge, experience, and identity cannot be “spoken” if one accedes to the situation’s demands. Materially, such scrutiny can be located firmly within the space of the classroom for which such writing is produced. As such, analyzing the writing spaces proffered through assignments would also examine, as Horner suggests, “the writing in relation to the conditions of time, the assignment, the course, the situation of that course and its instructor within the curriculum and specific institution” (Terms 65), as well as the material modes of production (e.g., computer, paper, etc.) and circulation (e.g., publication, grading, etc.) to which such writing is subjected (see Trimbur, “Circulation”). Subjecting the writing process of a single text to so many levels of scrutiny is, admittedly, a daunting task that may require different levels of analysis at varying points in the writing process. Making such analysis possible pedagogically necessitates developing new concepts and techniques that would help students analyze writing as both a discursive and material site of social relations. Bitzer’s explication of the rhetorical situation offers one way of highlighting the dense network of relations in which individual acts of writing are embedded. Because it presumes that writing “comes into existence for the sake of something beyond itself” (3), the rhetorical situation can locate writing both materially and discursively, providing a heuristic and terminology through which these layers of context might be broken down into smaller elements. The concepts of exigence and audience are particularly useful in analyzing the discursive and material influences on writing. Bitzer describes exigence as located in the material world—a need to respond to a situation that is initiated within the social real—that correspondingly

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inscribes only certain positions for writers. As such, exigence allows us to discuss how the “need” for writing within a college classroom comes about. Any assignment has a similar exigence in how it locates student writers. The material exigence of an assignment is typically evaluative, thus the exigence of most, if not all, writing assignments invokes the ideology of the student as an “initiate” whose ways of thinking and writing are subject to the disciplinary practices of the institution. Further, any assignment also invokes a discursive reality in that it suggests a type of language and an audience that might best be addressed by writing, which, in turn, correspond to demands imposed by discourse communities, genres, styles, and dialect. Such discursive mechanisms also participate in positioning the student within an authoritative discourse as a novice, but they help specify those demands to the subject positions a student might occupy within the enunciative modality of this one assignment. The “need” that any given assignment creates for writing, that is, also specifies the parameters of how that need might be met discursively and materially. Similarly, audience functions both materially and discursively as well. On the one hand, the addressed audience, to use Ede and Lunsford’s terms, is always the classroom teacher. As such, the concept of audience can help connect the analyses of classroom space (discussions, readings, interactions with peers and teacher, etc.) materially to the writer’s assumptions about what is expected in his/her writing. Yet, audience also functions discursively, invoking certain discourse communities, an institutional gaze, and the cultural currency granted to certain kinds of writing and writers. In sum, any writing assignment invokes both a larger discursive audience (e.g., other professors, future professionals, the public gaze) as well as the more localized body of teacher and peers in the classroom. When I used to teach the rhetorical situation in composition classrooms, students would analyze context so that they could attempt to accede to the situation’s demands in terms of audience, purpose, genre, and style. Refigured within a more critical pedagogy, a close look at the rhetorical situation can help students understand its limitations and connections to larger social structures. Analyzing a rhetorical situation becomes a way of answering questions about the kinds of perspectives it suggests one take on a topic (and its links to disciplinary epistemology), the genre that seems most appropriate (and how those genres are authorized institutionally within disciplines and composition classrooms), and the style that is determined to best “communicate” knowledge on the topic. But the goal of such analysis would also serve a much different purpose. It would allow for a critical interrogation of both what any given rhetorical situation implies about the choices one can make to appropriately write in response to it and what limitations on knowledge, voice, experience, and perspective those discursive demands suggest be taken on the “slice of reality” one may be writing about. Through the concepts of audience and exigence, a critical composition classroom could further connect such analyses to the local classroom space that has constructed the rhetorical situation, examining how audience expectations

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might be connected to readings of classroom interaction, or how exigence emerges both from the classroom context and its location within educational institutions. The concept of rhetorical situations, in sum, suggests multiple levels of analysis that could make many of the demands imposed by local writing assignments open to scrutiny. Students could begin by analyzing how the assignment (i.e., exigence) and audience work locally in a classroom, inquiring into what expectations about “appropriate” writing it sets up, and connecting those expectations to what has occurred in this classroom up to this point. Then, this more local context analysis could be connected to the broader cultural analyses students have already conducted (e.g., disciplinary investigations into writing and epistemology, public presumptions about literacy, and the function of the composition classroom within the institution). Through this dual level of analysis, students are asked to consider what limitations a particular writing assignment attempts to impose in terms of the kind of research they can/must do, the topics they can choose to write about, the perspectives they can take on that topic, what kinds of experience they might be able to include, the style they must write in, and so on. When I have experimented with this kind of analysis, my students, not surprisingly given our earlier cultural studies, highlight demands such as connecting to previously published and authorized texts; taking an objective stance on observation or a critical stance on reading; coming up with a single purpose rather than multiple ones; or writing in Edited American English (EAE). In short, students, armed with the kinds of cultural work done in other investigations of literacy, can fairly quickly begin to list the expectations implied by a writing assignment in terms of language and epistemology. The next step, then, could include considering ideologically what taking such a position might imply for the writer. What worldviews would she implicitly be accepting? What power relations? What identity politic is inherent in taking these perspectives and writing in these genres? In short, what, besides writing a particular kind of text, is this rhetorical situation offering the writer? These discussions can be wide-ranging depending on the students’ interests and positions. For example, some of my students, informed by our inquiries into how texts can communicate “gendership,” focus on the implicit gender position they are being asked to adopt. Others hone in on the ways of thinking they are not sure they are ready to accept, while still others realize they have experiences that seem relevant to the topic but which are ostensibly excluded by audience expectations and/or genre. Still others, of course, see no problem with the ideologies implied by a particular rhetorical situation. The goal of such work, however, is not to have students see the writing space as an oppressive one, but rather to help them assess its demands in order to make decisions about what aspects, if any, they might change about the positions it creates for writers to occupy. In Bitzer-like fashion, the goal is to highlight how rhetorical situations delimit a writer’s choices; to expose how “the situation controls the rhetorical response in the same sense that the question controls the solution” (Bitzer 6).

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Inquiring into this kind of “control”—what Foucault might call the discourse’s ability to proffer enunciative modalities that writers then fill appropriately—is to empower the writer to make choices other than those delimited by the situation should she so choose. Making such choices must also involve understanding the material consequences of those choices for her institutional position as student. Scrutinizing rhetorical stations, that is, must also come back to a consideration of the material exigence of any writing assignment: the student position it continually reinscribes within the institution’s power arrangements. As such, considerations of how to “answer” the call of a given rhetorical situation also involves reflection upon the consequences of those choices for one’s material position within an evaluative structure with consequences far beyond one paper’s grade. Part of the critical work we might ask students to do, then, involves not only analyzing the ideology of given rhetorical situations, but also considering why they might decide not to fulfill all of its demands. What is at stake for them? What would an act of agency in this writing space risk? Is that a risk they are willing to incur? This kind of work can become part of the writing process in class. Each student, as part of the heuristic and prewriting for a given assignment, can create not only an analysis of the rhetorical situation but also a reflective piece about the choices they might make and why they might make them. In my experiments with this, I insist that if they make another choice, it must be a strategic one. I ask to see within their analysis (which functions as a cover sheet to the final paper) an elaboration of the specific element of the rhetorical situation they want to change, and an explanation for what result such a change might have for their readers or them personally. I do not want critical scrutiny of the writing space to open up an acceptance of any kind of writing; such a move would serve only to ignore, rather than interact with, the discursive and material conditions of the writing space. Rather, I ask to see a deliberate act of agency, made with full knowledge of its desired effect in terms of what it might attempt to resist, and the potential material consequences for the student of such resistance. For most students, alternative choices do not immediately present themselves, nor does the need to make such choices. Through the writing process, then, and in peer workshops on drafts, students can also be asked to critically interrogate the reading practices to which they are submitting their own work and that of their peers’. For example, Horner recommends asking students to more explicitly consider different readings of a draft in terms of the “demands we were making of it” (Terms 65); that is, the assumptions about academic writing and student authorship applied to a draft. In this way, the revision process can also help explicate the social-material conditions in which student writing is produced, and the material demands to which such writing responds (or is expected to respond), in ways that might help writers see other options as possibilities. Revision can become a process of, literally, re-seeing one’s work in light of the material conditions in which it is produced, the internalized

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gaze of its readers, and the implicit assumptions about academic discourse it responds to. Enacting agency within the space of a single rhetorical situation, however, cannot be forced nor should it be. Neither is it solely analytic, despite my insistence on analysis above. Rather, acts of agency might best be viewed within the precise terms John Trimbur has recently outlined—as a structure of feeling. Although Trimbur focuses upon our own investments in various theories of agency as a structure of feeling, student agency seems to work similarly. In my experience, students’ willingness or desire to enact agency emerges, not surprisingly, from feeling as much as thought, and only in particular material circumstances. It is typically initiated by a writer’s block or a frustration with a particular assignment that, occasionally, can even manifest itself as anger against the teacher or the class. I have discovered this primarily from my writing center work. In one-on-one conferences, one frequently begins with a student’s “feeling” about an assignment, with a frustration that cannot always be explained. Some of this frustration, as I’ve only recently learned to hear in such exchanges, may partially result from a discomfort with the act of writing itself, from “a structure of feeling” that supplies “the motives that bump up against formally held systematic beliefs” (Trimbur, “Agency” 287). Deeply sedimented into our bodily experience of culture—what Probyn has termed ontological experience as opposed to epistemological experience—students’ affective responses to writing acts should receive just as much attention as their analytic ones lest we miss the means by which the motives for agency frequently “bubble over” from “people’s struggle to make a life in the world” (Trimbur 288). Significantly, the pedagogy I suggest above emerges as much, if not more, from individual exchanges with students as from the more rigorous arguments I put forth in this book. Only in its initial developmental stages, this pedagogy began materially, in tutorials and conferences with students who were frustrated, puzzled, or stymied by particular assignments. In one case, a student in a tutorial finally admitted to me that she couldn’t draft a paper for her nursing class because she was upset with her teacher’s demands. An LPN for ten years in a cancer treatment center prior to returning to school, this student wanted, initially, to rely on her experience as “proof” in developing a treatment plan in response to a case study of a cancer patient provided in the assignment. Her instructor, however, told her she must rely on written sources. In another instance, one of my own students, I finally discovered in conference, was stymied by one of my own “argumentative” assignments because it forced her to rely on library research. Instead, she wanted to forge an argument not only from experience but in a narrative genre that she felt would argue her position more effectively. In another case, ironically enough in a course on literacy and culture, I had asked students to take a position on the relationship between literacy, culture, and identity by relying on the work we had read in class. One of my students angrily pointed out to me the hypocrisy of asking for such a position in the genre of academic argumentation and the dialect of EAE after we had just

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read much work on multiple literacies in the United States that highlighted the connections among diverse dialects and genres, cultural identity, and power relations with schooled literacy. I negotiated such encounters individually. The nursing student and I constructed a writing plan whereby she would rely on her personal knowledge but include textual citations as a “see also” in footnotes. I asked my student who wanted to write a narrative argument to include a cover sheet explaining why she thought this genre worked more effectively, and to provide me with directions for how it should be read. Finally, my literacy and culture student not only wrote a position paper in BEV, her critique of my practice led me to change the assignment itself. In these local acts of agency, students themselves did much of the work I suggest we help orchestrate pedagogically. Their desire to enact such agency, however, began in all cases within their “felt sense” that something was amiss and preventing them from completing particular assignments. As a result, finding means of reflecting on affective responses to localized writing situations seems just as important as the analytic modes I suggest above. No matter the form such work actually takes, however, the goal remains the same: helping students realize other choices are available in the writing spaces we construct. While some students will enact agency on their own, they should not be asked to incur all the risk. Rather, if we truly hope to encourage students to see writing as a means of social action, we must also be willing to risk the scrutiny of our own practices that taking such action necessitates. Enacting agency as student writers, in this way, means social action upon academic discourse itself, action directed at transforming not only our students’ sense that identities within academic discourse must include discursive identifications to the exclusion of others, but also action that highlights the exclusionary practices we participate in as part of this discourse. Engaging the hybrid in student writing might increase our students’ ability to cross the borders academic discourse sets up, resulting in a better sense of how literacy operates materially and discursively on their own bodies, but it also must necessarily include a willingness to “hear” that difference and reflect upon our own roles in creating the borders students begin to cross. As Stephanie told us, one of the central steps toward enacting hybridity was trusting that her audience was willing to have her academic gaze interrupted. If we are willing to listen, we can learn a lot from a pedagogy that takes student writing more seriously as cultural work. Most pointedly, what I have learned is how much of my own pedagogy, aimed at cultural study and critical pedagogy, actually functioned to exclude the most potentially challenging difference my students brought with them to my classrooms. LOOKING FORWARD, TEMPERING OPTIMISM

I admit that what I have suggested here is extensive and unlikely to be executed in one composition class. In fact, the sample assignments I have included come from a variety of courses: first-year composition, junior-level writing courses, and even content-area courses on topics like literacy and culture. What I am

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suggesting, then, is not something that can be located solely in first-year composition. Instead, given the different institutional arrangements we all occupy, the specific nature of assignments or student work must follow from institutional needs and limitations. What is most central is attending more closely to student writing as an act of cultural production that intersects with the identities students’ bring with them from other contexts. Such a move entails (1) developing an understanding of self in relation to culture and how identities come to be formed in differential power relationships; (2) analyzing the relationship of those identities to academic discourse in both its local and systemic manifestations within the institution and culture; and (3) providing the opportunity for students to strategize the writing space and make other rhetorical choices in favor of agency. While there are many things we can do pedagogically to intervene into the devastating identity politics I’ve outlined throughout this book, no single intervention will guarantee that students will come to resee their subjectivities as contested sites and sources of agency. Helping students see their subjectivities as relationally positioned to academic discourse will hopefully make the ideology of self/Other relations and their categorical identity rhetorics more open to student scrutiny. Yet, as hopeful as I am about the possibilities for such a pedagogy, I keep wondering whether anything I have suggested in this chapter would have helped Sheila and Matt: the two students who prompted this book. Would these new ways of thinking about writing, for example, offer Sheila other options besides the forced choice she made between the Church of Latter Day Saints and academics? Would such a critical interrogation of literacy’s function in culture, and the potentially oppressive positions it offers for writing, have encouraged Matt to construct his desire for the dominant differently? Honestly, I don’t know. What I do know is that, ultimately, Matt and Sheila were already smarter than I was. Sheila understood, in ways I was then incapable of doing, the self/ Other relation imposed by academic discourse. Matt already understood himself as deeply implicated by his sexuality, gender, and race in the pursuit of capitalist success. In short, Matt and Sheila, on their own, had accomplished some of what I recommend here. While I still hope pedagogy can have a different result, I also have to recognize that the choices they both made were conscious ones. Matt and Sheila could so clearly explain their reasons for rejecting academic discourse (Sheila) and/or completely accepting the unification it offers (Matt) that their critical sense of the relations between culture, language, and the material were obviously already engaged. What they have left me to ponder is whether it is even ethical to assume that students should engage the agency available to them, or whether my job is simply to make that agency obvious and possible, ultimately leaving the choice up to them. While composition may play a role in “staring down oppression,” the students’ gaze cannot be forced in these directions. An equal desire to engage in social transformation needs to come from them, from the structures of feeling and corporeal experience they engage in

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their everyday lives. Agency, in short, works best when it is understood within the precise care for self that we have seen in more oppressive relations. Agency must be seen as a way to materially and discursively enact change that matters to students. What I can do is ensure my own classrooms are not encouraging them to submerge their difference nor making acts of agency even more difficult. Perhaps that is enough.

Appendix

BASIC WRITING STUDENTS

Pseudonym

Gender

Ethnicity

Aretha Ben Bruce Cassandra Charlie Dan Dave Diane Denzel Dominic Joe Judy Julie Latisha LaVonne Lori Matt Neil Nick Spiro Swati Tim Tom Todd Zeeva

Female Male Male Female Male Male Male Female Male Male Male Female Female Female Female Female Male Male Male Male Female Male Male Male Female

African American White White African American White White White White African American Italian American (third gen.) White White White African American African American White White White White Greek American (second gen.) Indian American (first gen.) White White White Israeli American (second gen.)

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appendix ENGLISH GRADUATE STUDENTS

Pseudonym

Gender

Ethnicity

Sexual Orientation

Socioeconomic Class

Barbara Carole Cathy Cindy Holly Janet John Kim Margaret Mark Mary Patty Rajiv Rich Sarah Sheila Stephanie Stanley Tanya Tricia Vicki

Female Female Female Female Female Female Male Female Female Male Female Female Male Male Female Female Female Male Female Female Female

White White White White White White White White White White White White Indian National White White White White White African American White White

Heterosexual Heterosexual Heterosexual Heterosexual Heterosexual Heterosexual Heterosexual Heterosexual Homosexual Homosexual Heterosexual Heterosexual Homosexual Heterosexual Heterosexual Heterosexual Bisexual Heterosexual Heterosexual Heterosexual Heterosexual

Working Middle Working Middle Middle Middle Upper-Middle Middle Upper-Middle Middle Middle Upper-Middle Upper Upper Upper-Middle Middle Working Working Working Middle Working

Notes

INTRODUCTION 1. The autobiographies are drawn from four classes (two graduate, two undergraduate) in which the topic of discourse’s relation to identity was foregrounded explicitly. The two basic writing courses followed similar syllabi focused on language and community. The graduate courses highlighted these issues either as concerns in the teaching of basic writing, or the explicit topic in a special topics course on Writing and Difference. In the graduate classes the discussion of difference was more influenced by poststructural concepts of multiple power relations and the fluidity of subjectivity. In this context, then, the writers are incited to take on the very issues that concern me here: the effect of academic discourse on other cultural identities and the influence of academic discourse on their own constitution of self. For syllabi of all four classes, see LeCourt, Self in Motion. 2. Although I will refer to “schooled language” as a general, cover-all term, schooled language is not monolithic. Instead, schooled language might more appropriately be thought of as referring to the languages of the academic institution, or “dialects” of a similar language. In sum, schooled language designates the various manifestations of academic discourse, the latter being that which embodies certain ways of knowing, worldviews, and values that might manifest themselves in that language. Thus, academic discourse, not its various manifestations, transcends disciplinary boundaries, embodying all the language used within the institution. chapter two ACADEMIC DISCOURSE AND SUBJECT PRODUCTION 1. As a form of analysis, I read the texts to distinguish recurring themes related to discursive interactions. Although in my analysis I generated categories that refer to particular themes and computed percentages to reflect the proportion of texts that reflected those themes, such quantitative analysis is only instructive as to the pervasiveness of these issues and offers an impressionistic view. As such, I will primarily refer to the themes in terms of “a lot,” “many,” “most,” and other general descriptors to acknowledge the nonscientific way in which the texts were read; that is, an analysis filtered through my own interpretative screen in a form of literary/poststructural analysis. For a list of themes and percentages, consult LeCourt, Self in Motion. 2. In this overview of the themes in the literacy autobiographies I will use many pseudonyms that may be hard to track. At this point in the analysis, however, the emerging

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patterns are more important than the individual writers. For a list of pseudonyms and details on the race, class, gender, and sexuality of the writers, consult the appendix. 3. No attempt was made to edit for errors in quoting student texts; in fact, these “errors” are frequently quite illuminating for the analysis. 4. I should note, however, that some basic writers tie this more explicitly to writing, particularly rules of grammar and usage. Charlie, for example, writes that “the art of grammar shaped me.” 5. It’s important to note that all these references to frustration with internalizing an academic “perspective” come from women. chapter four COLONIALISM, CAPITALISM, AND COMPOSITION 1. I am constructing a somewhat false time line here for explanatory purposes. As Bhabha and others argue, hybridity occurs alongside colonial discourses—the hybridity of the colonized and its remaking of colonial discourses can be contemporaneous with colonialism. Yet binary identity relations also form the condition of possibility for any hybrid since one cannot transgress what does not exist and, in that way, binary identity relations may be thought to precede hybridity. 2. For work connecting sexuality and gender to capital, see Rosemary Hennessy’s Profit and Pleasure and Donald Morton’s The Material Queer. 3. As I will discuss in chapter 6, some work is now appearing that attempts to attend more directly to this problem in cultural studies (e.g., Drew, “Teaching”; Sidler and Morris) but they are the notable exceptions. chapter five THE TURN TO IDENTIT Y 1. Given how the writers indicate the differential impact of academic discourse on identity constitution, I take up these relationships categorically myself, although such an organization risks the very act of marking of identities and bodies I seek to critique. For the moment, however, such categories are necessary to illustrate how much the transparency of the self and the markedness of the Other create the framework within which the writers come to perceive and remake their identities. 2. I focus exclusively on the graduate students in this section because the basic writers were uncomfortable reporting data on sexual orientation and class. As a result, I have no information on these forms of privilege except when they are clearly indicated in the texts; not surprisingly, such information is introduced only by the students who see such positions as Other in culture, such as the working-class students. It should be noted, however, that many of the white male basic writers also evince a strong belief in their ability to succeed via meritocracy, even if that belief is less assured because of their placement in a basic writing class. Whether such a belief emerges from a similar relationship to the self ’s transparency—white, straight, middle-class, and male—is, however, impossible to determine; thus I cannot know if this invocation of meritocracy emerges from a position in culture similar to the graduate students who comment more explicitly on their privilege. 3. Janet may have a sense of other subjectivities that she chooses not to write about because of the schooled context in which the autobiography was written. From her text,

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however, no other sense is present. Instead, for the period of her Masters’ degree, the reader gets a feeling that Janet perceives herself almost as a fragmented blank slate. This failure to mention other “selves” is significant, however. Janet may believe she cannot acknowledge another sense of identity in schooled writing, a testament in itself to the unification academic discourse seems to warrant. 4. As the appendix indicates, I also collected texts from lesbian and bisexual women; however, no such explicit link between sexual identity and literacy was drawn in their texts, perhaps due to the complications of the feminine/masculine binary in which they, too, are immersed.

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Ahmad, Aijaz. In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures. New York: Verso, 1992. ———. “The Politics of Postcoloniality.” Race and Class 36.3 (1995): 1–20. Alexander, Claire. “I/i: Feminist Postcolonial Studies and Cultural Studies Composition.” Journal of Advanced Composition 19.2 (1999): 269–83. Armstrong, Timothy J., ed. and trans. Michel Foucault: Philosopher. 1989. New York: Routledge, 1992. Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, eds. The Post-Colonial Studies Reader. New York: Routledge, 1995. Bahri, Deepika. “Terms of Engagement: Postcolonialism, Transnationalism, and Composition Studies.” Journal of Advanced Composition 18.1 (1998): 29–44. Balester, Valerie. Cultural Divide. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook, 1993. Barnett, Timothy. “Reading ‘Whiteness’ in English Studies.” College English 63.1 (2000): 9–37. Bartholomae, David. “Inventing the University.” When a Writer Can’t Write. Ed. Mike Rose. New York: Guilford P, 1985. 134–65. Berlin, James. Rhetorics, Poetics, and Cultures: Refiguring College English Studies. Urbana: NCTE, 1996. Berlin, James and Michael Vivion, eds. Cultural Studies in the English Classroom. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook, 1992. Bhabha, Homi. “Cultural Diversity and Cultural Difference.” The Post-Colonial Studies Reader. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, eds. New York: Routledge, 1995. 206–09. ———. The Location of Culture. New York: Routledge, 1994. Bitzer, Lloyd. “The Rhetorical Situation.” Philosophy and Rhetoric 1.1 (1968): 1–14. Bizzell, Patricia. Academic Discourse and Critical Consciousness. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 1992. ———. “Cognition, Convention and Certainty: What We Need to Know about Writing.” PRE/TEXT 3 (1982): 213–43.

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Index

Affective relations, 19–22, 83–86, 97, 156–58, 160, 162, 176, 181, 218, 220 Agency, 2, 4–5, 7–9, 11–12, 20, 24–25, 28–29, 31–33, 37, 40–42, 46–49, 52, 54–55, 57–59, 69, 73, 75, 88, 90–92, 94–95, 97–99, 105–07, 109–11, 114, 117, 119–20, 132, 143–44, 146, 149– 152, 157–59, 163, 171, 173, 177–78, 185, 187–88, 193–95, 197, 199–200, 202–07, 212–13, 217–21 Ahmad, Aijaz, 106 Alexander, Claire, 107 Alternative literacies, 11, 132–34, 139 exclusion of, 39, 54, 134, 138, 147, 176 Althusser, Louis, 41, 105 Aretha, 44, 49, 50, 61, 137, 139 Ashcroft, Bill, 109 Audience, 17, 87, 130, 165, 201–02, 209–10, 214–16 Autonomy. See Being, autonomous Bahri, Deepika, 114 Balester, Valerie, 28, 134, 135 Barbara, 167–68, 188 Barnett, Timothy, 124, 195–96 Bartholomae, David, 27 Basic writers, 9, 41–46, 50, 57, 59–62, 64, 66, 81, 86–87, 124, 136, 153, 163, 225–26 Being autonomous, 74, 84, 92–99, 108, 144, 146–47, 155–59, 169, 195– 96

ontological, 76, 85, 94, 97–98, 176, 218 Ben, 49, 56, 68, 87 Berkenkotter, Carol, 210 Berlin, James, 28, 131–32, 206 Bhabha, Homi, 108, 115, 119, 121, 177, 184, 186, 198, 204, 226 Binary oppositions/relations, 6, 29, 108– 111, 118–20, 124–25, 130, 133, 136, 144, 151, 156, 160, 173, 175, 178, 182, 186, 195, 206 Bitzer, Lloyd, 214, 216 Bizzell, Patricia, 27, 116, 127 Black English Vernacular, 134–35, 219 Blackness, 108, 118 Bleich, David, 118 Bloom, Lynn, 116, 141 Body/Subject, 99, 145, 196–97, 203, 206–07 Borders, construction of, 18, 24, 124, 130, 132–33, 139, 146, 148, 151, 158, 181, 219 Border-crossing, 6, 18, 20, 28, 110–11, 114, 116, 134, 181, 185–86, 202, 219 Brandt, Deborah, 26, 207 Brodkey, Linda, 28, 32, 116–18, 130, 161, 196 Brown, Stephen Gilbert, 130 Bruce, 44 Bruffee, Kenneth, 27 Bryant, Lizbeth, 126 Burke, Kenneth, 40, 194 Butler, Judith, 73, 95, 97, 156, 197

239

240

index

Capitalism colonialism and, 106, 112–13, 115, 226 composition and, 106–07, 115–20, 124, 129, 134, 144–45, 161, 194 desire and, 20, 79–80, 83–86, 93, 105–06, 144–45, 148–49, 152, 162, 165, 168, 181–88 postcoloniality and, 106, 113–14 whiteness and, 118, 124–25, 134 Care for self, 90–94, 98–99, 107, 115, 148, 152, 155, 174, 177, 181, 188, 199, 221 Carole, 170, 171 Cassandra, 47, 48, 56, 60, 88 Cathy, 135–37, 139 Cayton, Mary Kupiec, 118 Chambers, Ross, 122 Chaput, Catherine, 116 Charlie, 43, 44, 60, 165–66, 168, 188, 226 Civil Rights, 13, 22, 26, 211 Clark, Romy, 38, 40, 73–74 Class composition and, 116–18, 124–25, 127, 141 politics, 106–07, 112–15, 125 socioeconomic, 2–3, 5, 14–16, 20, 22, 25–26, 31, 36, 78–79, 149– 153, 155, 157–59, 173, 187–88, 196. See also working class Clifford, John, 41 Colonialism, 106–111, 113–117, 119, 121, 127–28, 131–34, 145, 177, 181, 184, 186, 197, 203 Competing cultural discourses. See Alternative literacies Contact zone, 6, 10, 17–19, 21, 28, 110, 112, 116, 127–28, 203 Critical pedagogy, 3, 6, 205, 215, 219 Crowley, Sharon, 9 Cultural studies, 3, 65, 110, 116, 130– 31, 204, 206–07, 211, 213, 216, 226 Dan, 44, 47, 82 Dean, Terry, 27, 130 Deleuze, Gilles, 56–57, 65, 85, 93 Delpit, Lisa, 116

Denzel, 41, 52, 57, 178–82, 184, 186 Desire, 106, 144, 148, 176, 188 for academic discourse, 74, 80, 83, 86, 91–92, 136–39, 149, 151, 157, 162, 165, 169, 186, 194, 197, 199, 214 for agency (and being), 76–77, 84, 87, 92–95, 97–98, 152, 170, 217–19 for economic success, 5, 84–86, 105, 144, 160, 162, 181–82 for particular subject positions, 3, 53–54, 74, 77, 82, 86, 98–99, 107, 136–38, 168, 172, 175–76 social structure and, 20, 32, 74, 77, 86, 91, 177, 197, 209, 212 for subjectification, 19, 74–77, 82– 85, 90, 96 Diane, 44–45, 82, 87, 136–37, 139 Differance, 9, 42, 147 Difference as opposed to diversity, 24, 28, 112, 114, 117, 129, 178, 188, 191–97 irreducible, 150–151, 173–87 in relation to sameness, 23–27, 29, 31–32, 142, 157, 186 reducible, 150, 159–73, 184 in self/Other relations. See self/Other Discourse community, 10, 27, 116, 140, 213, 225 Discursive formations, 11, 37, 54–58, 64–65, 80, 93, 96, 148 Discursive-material relations, 10, 12, 27, 40, 107, 126, 158, 181, 197, 199, 204. See also material-discursive relations Dixon, Kathleen, 131 Dominic, 47, 86 Double consciousness, 173, 175, 183, 187, 189 Drew, Julie, 106, 193, 204–05 Eagleton, Terry, 95 Ebert, Teresa, 7 Ede, Lisa, 215 Elbow, Peter, 198 Elliott, Mary, 122 Emotion. See Feelings

index Enfleshment, 20, 83, 86, 187 English graduate students, 9, 41–43, 45– 46, 48, 51, 57, 59, 62–64, 66, 81, 153, 155, 163, 166, 226 Enunciative modalities, 58–59, 61, 64, 90, 132, 146, 148, 151, 187, 197, 199, 201, 215 Epistemology, 10, 55, 64–69, 85, 128, 169, 202, 210–11, 215–16, 218 Everyday life, 17–18, 22, 31, 74, 76, 92, 95, 102, 140, 150, 162, 166, 182, 207 Ewald, Francois, 94 Faigley, Lester, 28 Fanon, Frantz, 177 Feelings, 4, 19, 21, 45–46, 51–52, 84– 85, 97, 143, 152–55, 157–58, 172, 201, 218, 230. See also Affective relations Feminism, 24, 109, 118–19, 121, 123, 131, 141, 156, 169, 172, 199–201, 207 Fitts, Karen, 28 Fluid subject/fluidity. See Subjectivity, fluid. Flynn, Elizabeth, 118 Foucault, Michel, 54–56, 58–59, 64–65, 75, 77, 79, 80, 91–97, 107, 141, 146, 148–49, 199, 217 Fox, Thomas, 116, 161, 162 France, Alan, 28, 126 Frank, Manfred, 55, 57 Gale, Xin Liu and Frederic, 195 Gatens, Moira, 169, 173 Gates, Henry Louis Jr., 13, 30, 176 Gaze, cultural, 71, 133, 135, 138–39, 145–46, 148, 50, 155, 158–60, 162, 168, 173, 176–77, 184, 188, 197–98, 202, 215, 219, 220 Gender, 11, 14, 15, 21, 23–24, 31, 34, 52, 79, 99, 111–13, 115–18, 120–21, 124–26, 135, 149–150, 153, 157–60, 168–69, 172, 175, 183, 190, 196–97, 199, 216, 220, 226 Gilyard, Keith, 9, 20, 111, 117, 125, 184–85, 195 Giroux, Henry, 131 Graff, Harvey, 78

241

Griffiths, Gareth, 109 Grossberg, Lawrence, 121 Grosz, Elizabeth, 86 Guerra, Juan, 130 Gutjahr, Paul, 131 Hall, Stuart, 30, 37–39, 58–59, 65, 73, 75, 93, 97, 105–08, 110, 113, 119, 143, 145–47, 155, 171, 183, 193–94 Harkin, Patricia, 26 Harris, Joseph, 17, 27–28, 128 Haswell, Janis and Richard, 122, 212 Heath, Shirley Brice, 11, 27, 112–13, 207 Heath, Stephen, 96 Hegemony, 22, 28, 83 Helmer, Marguerite, 124 Hennessy, Rosemary, 7, 226 Hesford, Wendy, 18, 28, 31–32 Holly, 81 hooks, bell, 157, 184, 186 Horner, Bruce, 26, 116, 128, 195–96, 203–04, 214, 217 Huckin, Tom, 210 Hull, Glynda, 101 Hum, Sue, 128 Hybridity, 20, 103, 106–07, 109–14, 119, 121–22, 128, 145, 152, 163, 173, 175, 177–78, 185–86, 188, 198–99, 202, 204, 207, 219, 226 Identification rhetorical, 40–43, 46, 54, 59–66, 69, 88 temporary construction of, 38, 65, 69, 97, 99, 148–50 Identity construction/constitution, 3, 5– 9, 11, 17, 27, 29, 37–39, 54, 65, 73– 76, 98–99, 105–08, 119, 129, 137– 39, 144–45, 147–50, 156, 159, 162– 63, 169, 178, 188, 197 Identity politics, 1, 14–17, 19, 21–23, 25, 29, 31–32, 34–35, 38, 83, 99, 106–08, 111, 115–20, 123–29, 133, 138–39, 152–53, 155, 157, 159–61, 164, 168–69, 175–76, 178, 184, 186– 88, 194, 197, 204–05, 211–12, 214, 220

242

index

Identity rhetorics public, 17, 19, 21–22, 29–31, 105, 117, 120, 125, 129, 144, 146, 159, 160, 207 of school, 1, 77–78, 84–85, 90, 99, 144 Imperialism, 106–07, 109–10, 113, 115, 117, 124, 129, 133, 177 Individualism, 22, 25, 92–93, 95–96, 99, 108, 120, 150, 159–60, 173, 187 Institutions critical analysis of, 206–08, 210–12 in culture, 4, 10, 16–17, 22–24, 33, 37–38, 64, 76, 82, 91, 105, 111–14, 149, 199, 203 in discursive formations, 54–57, 79, 203, 225 in power/knowledge relations, 53, 57–58, 80, 148, 214 school, 10, 17, 24–26, 31–33, 39– 40, 49, 54, 56–57, 59, 61, 64, 74, 79, 81, 99, 105, 114–15, 128, 134–35, 139, 143, 150, 152, 161, 175, 184, 194 Interpellation, 3, 4, 7, 21, 28, 38, 41, 56, 73, 93, 117 Irigaray, Luce, 156, 172 Ivanic, Roz, 38, 40, 73–74 Jamieson, Sandra, 126, 195 Janangelo, Joseph, 126 Janet, 46, 48, 56, 63, 66, 81, 84, 153– 55, 157–59, 226–27 Jarratt, Susan, 107, 122 Joe, 61, 88, 137, 139, 163–64, 168, 188 John, 63, 66, 81, 152 Keating, Ann Louise, 124, 195 Kelly, Ursula, 84, 98 Kim, 67 Kraemer, Don, 118 Kramer-Dahl, Anneliese, 129 L.A. riots, 13, 15 Lamb, Catherine, 118 Latisha, 45, 47, 67, 88 LaVonne, 47–48, 50–51, 56–57, 138–39

LeCourt, Donna, 205–06, 210, 213, 225 Leverenz, Carrie Shively, 127 Literacy autobiographies. See particular pseudonyms Literacy crisis, 26 Literacy myth, 78 Liu, Yameng, 126–27 Loomba, Ania, 113, 115 Lori, 66, 89 Lu, Min-zhan, 26, 111, 114, 128, 196 Lunsford, Andrea, 25, 110–11, 215 MacCannell, Dean, 157 Macdonald, Bradley, 74, 83 Malinowitz, Harriet, 28, 123 Margaret, 62, 66, 68, 143, 172, 188 Mark, 152 Marshall, Ian, 124, 153, 195 Mary, 51–53, 62, 66, 172 Material-discursive relations, 1, 53, 74, 91, 118. See also Discursive-material relations Mazurek, Raymond, 131 McLaren, Peter, 19, 79, 83–84, 86, 125, 144, 157, 178, 188, 206 McLaughlin, Daniel, 129 McLaughlin, Milbrey, 112–13 Mejia, Jamie, 112–13 Mercer, Kobena, 124 Meritocracy academic institution and, 24–27, 99, 114, 125, 214 diversity and, 120, 123, 125 identification and, 151, 155, 157, 212, 226 rhetorics of, 79, 82, 112–13, 117, 161, 173, 208–09 Miller, Richard, 127 Miller, Susan, 132–33, 148 Morris, Richard, 226 Morton, Donald, 226 Moss, Beverly, 11, 207 Multiculturalism, 6, 28, 123, 126, 128, 130, 150, 178, 188, 194–96 Multiple self/subject. See Subjectivity, multiple Myers, Greg, 116

index Neil, 50, 57 Ogbu, John, 3 Ohmann, Richard, 116 Olson, Gary, 198 Open Admissions, 26 Paine, Charles, 205 Patty, 46, 63, 66, 96, 153 Performativity, 31, 34, 112, 132, 148, 198 Pleasure, politics of, 76, 82–86, 91–93 Politics of recognition. See Gaze Porter, James, 28 Postcolonialism, 1, 12, 106–07, 109–14, 116, 118–19, 145, 199 Poststructuralism, 6, 7, 31, 65, 73, 79, 80, 98, 106–07, 131, 133, 225 Power relations institutional, 10, 17, 22, 24–25, 31–33, 39, 49, 53–54, 56–58, 61, 64, 74, 76–77, 79–80, 82, 91, 99, 105, 113–15, 135, 139, 143–44, 148–50, 161, 173, 175, 183, 194, 202–04, 206, 210–12, 214–15, 217, 220 multiple, 5, 8, 17, 21, 28, 31, 55, 78–79, 99, 106, 109–10, 119, 131, 145, 149, 181, 225 oppressive, 2–3, 6–7, 22, 31–32, 83, 91, 99, 105, 110–11, 119, 124–25, 186, 195, 197, 208, 212, 216, 221 structural, 2, 4–8, 11, 26, 28, 30– 33, 48, 53, 79, 105–06, 110–16, 119, 121, 123–26, 131, 144, 149, 191, 193–94, 197, 203–05, 208–09, 215 Power/knowledge relations, 56, 58, 93 Pratt, Mary Louise, 28, 128, 196 Prendergast, Catherine, 123 Primary identities, 20, 159, 165, 175, 182, 185, 193 Probyn, Elspeth, 30, 85, 218 Prosser, Jay, 160 Psychoanalysis, 74, 76, 84, 97 Public sphere, 17, 19, 25–26, 78, 110, 116, 118, 124, 126, 134, 176, 211

243

Race, 13–16, 18–22, 30–31, 34–36, 52– 53, 71, 107–10, 112–13, 116–18, 122–27, 129, 134, 136–38, 142, 150– 53, 155, 157–58, 160–61, 168–69, 173, 175–87, 191, 194–96, 209, 212, 220 Racevskis, Karlis, 94 Racism, 2, 35, 78, 113, 117, 123–26, 157, 176, 178, 187–88, 208 Rajiv, 51, 66, 105, 138, 174–76, 178, 182, 199 Resistance, 3, 5–6, 28, 32, 201–02, 217 Rhetorical identification. See identification Rhetorical situation/context, 58, 132, 134, 205, 213–18 Rich, 62, 66, 68–69, 81, 90, 152 Rose, Mike, 9, 101 Rosenthal, Rae, 131 Royster, Jacqueline Jones, 118, 124, 145 Ryden, Wendy, 124, 195 Safe house(s), 17, 28, 116, 128, 186 Sarah, 46, 57, 63 Sawicki, Jana, 77, 149 Schilb, John, 26 Schooled Language/Literacy control over/loss of control with, 53, 59, 87–88, 137–38, 154, 158, 166 as cultural currency, 75, 80–81, 84, 98–99, 105, 145, 205, 208, 210 as distant, 41–46 identified relationship with, 59–63, 65–67, 136, 139, 163, 170 as inaccessible, 47–49 material artifact of discourse, 10, 42, 57, 187, 225 in pedagogy, 102, 132, 205, 211–12 restrictive ability, 50–53, 58, 94, 135, 179, 186, 200 value of/power of, 75, 78, 80–82, 92, 98, 115, 150, 172, 181–82, 205–09, 219 Seitz, David, 116, 162

244

index

Self/Other relations, 12, 107–15, 118– 30, 132–35, 138–39, 144–47, 149– 51, 155–59, 162–63, 169, 171, 173– 75, 177–81, 184, 186–87, 195, 198, 201–03, 206, 220 Selfe, Cynthia, 78 Sexuality, 16, 23, 34–36, 51, 107, 113– 14, 118, 122–25, 127, 135, 139, 149, 151, 153, 155–59, 173–76, 187, 191, 199–202, 212, 220, 226–77 Sheila, 48, 56, 63, 153 Shepard, Matthew, 14, 16 Sidler, Michelle, 226 Simpson, O.J., 13–15, 20, 23–24 Sloane, Sarah, 122 Smith, Jeff, 116 Social being, 2, 32, 40, 83, 85, 98 Social real, 6, 8, 10, 12, 18–19, 22, 27, 29, 31–32, 38–39, 54, 56–57, 74, 76–77, 82–84, 86, 93–95, 97–99, 107, 120, 125–26, 145–48, 151, 158– 59, 168, 171, 176–77, 185–86, 193, 197, 204–05, 213–14 Social relations, 2–4, 7, 10, 20–21, 27, 31–33, 38, 81, 84–86, 98, 135, 137, 144–45, 150, 159–60, 162–64, 167– 68, 171, 175–79, 181–84, 186, 188, 195–98, 203, 205, 209, 214 Soliday, Mary, 130, 196 Spiro, 82 Spivak, Gayatri, 199 Stephanie, 199–203, 206–07, 219 Strategy agency and, 2, 119, 191, 207, 217, 220 power and, 55, 58, 120, 161 Street, Brian, 11, 28 Stuckey, Elspeth, 99 Subject formation/production, 37, 39, 54, 93, 97, 105, 195, 197 Subjectification, 39–41, 54, 56, 58, 65, 69, 74–77, 82–83, 85, 88, 90–99, 133, 143–44, 150 Subjectivity dispersion of, 96, 98, 146, 152, 158 fluid, 2, 4, 6, 7, 20–21, 28–29, 31–32, 65, 69, 106, 110, 116,

130, 139, 144, 146, 148, 151, 158, 163, 172, 186, 188, 193, 198–99, 206, 225 multiple, 4, 18–20, 24, 27–32, 73, 75, 99, 105–06, 109–10, 112, 119, 124, 133, 138, 143–44, 147– 49, 151, 153, 156, 158–59, 161, 163–66, 171, 173–78, 181–82, 185, 187–88, 190, 198, 205–06 unified, 19, 21, 23, 133, 146, 148, 156–59, 166, 174, 185– 86, 206 Suture, 38, 59, 73, 75, 88, 96–97, 99, 144, 147 Swati, 44, 60, 66, 82, 84 Tanya, 182–86, 189 Tate, Gary, 131 Technological literacy, 78, 213 Technologies of production, 75–76, 80, 98 of power, 75–77, 80, 91, 94, 98, 198 of self, 75–82, 90–92, 93–94, 98– 99, 108, 162, 183, 198 of sign systems, 75–76, 80, 94, 98 of subject production, 57, 98, 195, 197, 207 Temporary attachment to subject position. See Identification Tiffin, Helen, 109 Tim, 37, 43, 45, 89 Todd, 44, 164, 168 Tom, 53, 57, 61 Transparency/transparent selves, 108, 112, 114–20, 122–27, 129–30, 134– 35, 137, 145, 150–59, 160–63, 167– 68, 171, 173, 175, 177, 179, 181, 184, 186–88, 191, 196, 201, 226 Trembath, Paul, 85 Tremonte, Colleen, 131 Tricia, 45–46, 51, 63, 67 Trimbur, John, 23, 28, 78, 205, 214, 218 Unification/unified subject. See Subjectivity, unified

index Vicki, 46, 97, 169, 170 Villanueva, Victor, 106, 111, 123 Vivion, Michael, 28 Wells, Susan, 17 West, Cornel, 18, 108–09 Whiteness, 15, 20, 34, 108–09, 118, 122, 124–27, 152–53, 157–58, 168, 178–79, 184, 187, 191, 195–96, 209 Will to knowledge, 77, 80, 90–91, 99, 137, 148–49, 168, 170–71, 182, 187 Williams, Jean, 124 Williams, Raymond, 85 Willis, Paul, 3 Wise, Christopher, 150 Working class, 12, 14, 20, 30, 34, 70– 72, 83, 99, 101–02, 113, 135–37, 140–41, 150–51, 159–171, 173, 176– 77, 190–91, 197, 226 Worsham, Lynn, 198 Writing conditions of production, 38, 40, 57, 205–19

245

enunciatory subject of, 64, 76, 90, 132, 146, 148, 151, 187–88, 197–99, 201–02, 217 to interrogate self, 195–97, 203 materiality of, 3, 7, 11, 28–29, 32, 86, 94, 130, 132–33, 143, 194 for social action/transformation, 38, 57, 64, 198–99, 201–04, 212, 219–20 as social material practice, 40, 57– 58, 73–74, 143, 194–99, 202–19 Writing across the curriculum (WAC), 210 Writing space as colonial encounter, 58, 129–34, 197, 203 critical scrutiny of, 204, 206, 210, 213–14, 216–17 site of discursive-material interaction, 199, 202–03, 212, 220 Zeeva, 60, 88, 89