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last.updated 11.11.07

 


Institutional Rhetoric

Purpose

Institutions, as the readings have argued, develop and reify certain rhetorics. Likewise, they are themselves rhetorical bodies, and therefore, subject to change. We will look at how institutional theories about the State are relevant to the composition classroom, as well as how we may or may not be able to change academic and programmatic institutions.

Before Class

  • Read Foucault "The Means of Correct Training" [BB]
  • Read Althusser "Ideology and The State" [BB]
  • Read Porter et al. "Institutional Critique" [College Composition and Communication, 51.4]
  • Read Bousquet "Composition as Management Science" [BB]
  • Read Crowley, "Composition's Ethic of Service" [BB]

FreeWrite

Map the major rhetoricians and scholars–those who develop rhetorical theory and those who use it for their practices–that we have studied so far. The purpose of the freewrite is to design a tool that will be useful for you to understand the big picture of the readings we have worked with so far (as well as the readings for the final few weeks). Choose a strategy that will work best for you. Spend ten to twenty minutes (no more) working on this. Use a colored marker–preferably black–so that you can share yours with the class.

Questions and Discussion (by Erin Pastore)

Althusser

  • If ideology serves to “transform individuals into subjects” in order to ensure a perpetuity of ideological production, it seems that Althusser is calling for a Marxist class revolt as the only solution to changing/ breaking/ adapting ideology. From this perspective, which subjugated class might he say is in more dire need of a revolt: undergraduates or graduate students and/ or adjuncts? Why?
  • Given the ultimate subjugation, can ideologies function positively for epistemological purposes? Or does being inherently imaginary make all permanently dangerous?
  • Althusser makes a claim that ISAs function to produce complicit workers for their ideological system; how might this tie to Crowley’s call to eliminate Frosh Comp?

Foucault

  • How do Foucault’s visual metaphors work to support his argument that discipline is the exercise of constant and nearly invisible power?
  • In understanding power’s need for discipline in order to maintain control and ideology’s need for subjugation to reproduce itself, is there anyway for a discipline (e.g. Rhet/ Comp) or institution to break free from controlling ideology? Or must students and instructors always live under one form or another?

Crowley

  • Crowley points out that the academic success found in students who take small composition courses may merely be a credit to our own service ethic and less about the need for Frosh Comp. To what extent might this be true? Even if it is, even if it may be holding us back professionally, do we want to disregard our service ethic in search of greener academic pastures?
  • Would eliminating Frosh Comp work to decentralize the hierarchical, disciplinary (ala Foucault) gaze situated on the incoming college student by eliminating an essentially gate keeping course?

Porter et al

  • How will establishing the field of writing as being both a part of and existing beyond the university create a more stable (tenure tracked?) field within the academy?
  • Are Porter et al submitting to the ideology of the university (a la Althusser) by first accepting their institutional reality (as Bousquet might believe)?
  • In working to create Rhet/ Comp graduate programs and writing majors are they reproducing their own conditions as a primary means of survival?

Bousquet

  • What does this “real” situation of composition non-tenured faculty/ instructors mean for student instruction?
  • How do the working conditions described re-create the hierarchical discipline described in Foucault?
  • Would Crowley’s proposition to eliminate Frosh Comp be a positive step to Bousquet?