Power, Language, Argument, the Body, Conferencing, Ed Grimley...

On Lassner:

(I’ll try to get all my digressive quotations out of the way with this article).

This article really challenged my earlier reception of Rogers, and Lassner's focus on contextualizing argument as a situated practice, one that occurs between individuals and groups that have differing levels of power, spoke to what I have known in my own experiences. Her focus on how Rogerian argument delimited the power of female students in her class--because it undermined their ability to oppose already dominant patriarchies--is intriguing:

"Feminist scholars have shown how far women have to go before they can even face that contending narrative. This is because women feel they must capitulate to the values of the majority culture in which they live. Engaging in a person-centered dialogue fails to acknowledge women's ambivalent relations to culture, the fact that although the language of the majority culture does not always fit their experiences, they often behave as though it does. Because women and other marginalized people don't always see themselves represented either at all or accurately in their culture, they often find language to be inhibiting rather than expressive. Hairston's claim that neutral language improves communication is therefore problematic because in the experience of many no language is neutral, non-directive, or nonjudgmental" (409).

This brought to mind for me a couple of things (time for the digressions). The first is one of my favorite essays, “Postmodern Blackness,” in which bell hooks (who Lamb refers to) observes that:

“[7] The postmodern critique of ‘identity,’ though relevant for renewed black liberation struggle, is often posed in ways that are problematic. Given a pervasive politic of white supremacy, which seeks to prevent the formation of radical black subjectivity, we cannot cavalierly dismiss a concern with identity politics. Any critic exploring the radical potential of postmodernism as it relates to racial difference and racial domination would need to consider the implications of a critique of identity for oppressed groups. Many of us are struggling to find new strategies of resistance. We must engage decolonization as a critical practice if we are to have meaningful chances of survival even as we must simultaneously cope with the loss of political grounding which made radical activism more possible. I am thinking here about the postmodernist critique of essentialism as it pertains to the construction of ‘identity’ as one example.”

I've always read this to mean that hooks feels that the critique of essentialist notions of ethnicity and authenticity comes at a time when those who have been oppressed and who experience the social facts related to their identities are still trying to be heard in the first place, to finally have a voice. While hooks acknowledges the emancipatory potential of the pomo critique, she also asserts--very powerfully--that those who have been oppressed will have to "cope with the loss" of the political grounding" that authenticy and identity provided radical activism. To me hooks' discussion of postmodernism and black identity parallels Lassner's observations about Rogerian argument and feminism.

Lassner's positing of rhetoric in terms of power relations brought to mind a second digression: there is this set of competing explanations in sociolinguistics for certain features that were first identified as aspects of “women’s speech" by the linguist Robin Lakoff (who was once married to George Lakoff, one of the authors of _Metaphors We Live By_, the book Dr. Strickland excerpted for us a few weeks ago). In her 1973 essay “Language and Woman's Place,” Lakoff posited that women use certain features much more than men, things like hedge phrases (e.g. “sort of,” “it seems like”), tag questions (e.g. “It sure is nice out, isn’t it?”), hyper-politeness, “empty” adjectives, indirect requests, and so on. Lakoff’s findings (they were largely intuitive) have been highly influential. It’s been observed--not entirely facetiously--that Deborah Tannen, who arguably edges out Saussure and William Labov as the most famous linguist of the 20th century after Noam Chomsky because of the popular reception of her books on gender differences in speech, owes her career to Lakoff (Tannen's _You Just Don't Understand_ spent four years on _The New York Times_ best-seller list). But they have also been disputed. Seven years after Lakoff published her initial findings, a study done by William O’Barr and Bowman Atkins was published under the title “’Women’s Language’ or ‘powerless language’?” in which they asserted that what had been considered features of gendered speech was, in fact, more about issues of power, in general. O'Barr and Atkins observed witnesses appearing court cases over a period of 30 months. They examined the witnesses’ testimonies for the features that between men and Lakoff had proposed were part of women’s speech. They concluded from their study that the quoted speech patterns were “neither characteristic of all women nor limited only to women”. The women who used the lowest frequency of women's language traits had an high status--educated professionals and those with upper-middle class backgrounds. Inversely, a corresponding pattern was noted among those men who used these features—they had relatively low social status.
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On Lamb:

I really loved this article--and it dovetails nicely with Lassner's, of course. One way to put them into dialogue, I think, comes on 157, when Lamb asserts that "it can be feminist to both at times be confrontational and at other times advocate approaches that minimize confrontation" contra, in a way, Lassner's well-taken point about historically contextualization.

I found several parts of Lamb's piece particularly interesting:

from 155: the description she includes by Kenneth Burke regarding the "unending conversation" of humankind is great, while at the same time her challenges to it ("...who has been invited and who has been left out...") are equally good. Lamb points out that "For the past twenty years of [feminist composition's] history, the emphasis has been on developing the personal voice. Argument, techniques of persuasion for gaining acceptance of one's point of view, if it was dealt with, was seen usually in pejorative terms, as an expression of patriarchy." But, she asserts, "there are now suggestions that other alternatives are possible.... alternatives which "return to women's experience in spite of the pitfalls of idealizing or overgeneralizing that experience." Women have not been able to remain in theory, because they "can not assume [they] will be heard" and so they "have had to articulate concrete ways to respond when there appears to be little, if any, common ground from which to negotiate a relationship."

156: Lamb briefly recounts the history of feminist composition, and emphasizes that because "Feminist composition was developing at a time also of great idealism in the women's movement;" there was an "illusion of a domain free of conflict" as "the variables of race, class, and sexual orientation were not a concern." (I'd say there actually *were* challenges by so-called "third wave" or "post-" feminists by this time--the early 1970s--but perhaps those challenges had not yet reached this field). The historical moment in which feminist composition arose, coupled with "an emphasis on developing a personal voice" meant that there was "no need to consider conflict; it may even be discouraged..." and this "emphasis on uncritically accepting what another has written means that real differences, whatever their sources, are elided."

157: see above; and she begins her "feminist responses to argument" with those "situations for conflict resolution in which one strives for an outcome that is acceptable to both parties"--mediation and negotiation are alternatives to argument, and...

158: Mediation and negotiation, Lamb argues, provide ways of resolving conflict "when the goal is no longer winning but finding a solution in a fair way that is acceptable to both sides." These alternatives to argument, "in which the goal is to win," require "a contrasting view of power" and she nods towards Foucault's formulation, which I love. I disagree, however, with her contention that there exists "a major difference" between her concern and Foucault's, that "Foucault's interest in analyzing power as it has been exercised historically or in existing societies and institutions" contrasts with her own "imagining new, positive ways in which it might be used." Foucault was very concerned--though skeptical, I would argue--in such possibilities (see my note on DeLuca below for further discussion).

159: I'm supremely intrigued by Lamb's description here of the unpublished paper by Julia Dietrich addressing the social construction of argument, so much so that I did as thorough a search as I know-how for the paper in every database I know, with no luck in finding it--and so I contacted Dr. Dietrich to try to procure a copy from her directly (she's a professor specializing in medieval literature, culture, and rhetoric; as well as Shakespeare; and argumentation, generally, at the University of Louisville--here's her website: http://www.louisville.edu/~jcdiet01/)

160: There are some great "one-liners" here regarding "maternal thinking" (a term that I resisted at first, but I came to accept it)--"If feminist responses to argument are to be viable, they must include in them a broader range of possibilities in their responses to conflict. Is it possible that power exercised can eventually be enabling?... The goal is still for writer and reader to establish and maintain a subject-subject relationship... The main feature of the relationship, however, may be needing to honor the present tension, staying in the moment of the disagreement, recognizing that resolution may never occur but that continuing the conversation is still a legitimate way of maintaining a relationship. The other party remains a subject, I think, if her or his views are still taken seriously, even if there appears to be no movement in the dialogue." This is a great observation, in my opinion, and from here I can go on to summarize more why I liked this article so much. Lamb goes on to quote hooks (161), who says in "Toward a Revolutionary Feminist Pedagogy" that her goal as a teacher "is to enable all students, not just an assertive few, to feel empowered in a rigorous, critical discussion, and in her discussion of responding, Lamb asserts that her role as a teacher "is not to provide the clarity and security of a prescribed form... it is to create the kind of atmosphere in which students can think honestly and openly about their position on an issue about which they care and then can reflect on the most generous response of which they are capable" (162--and she goes on to broadly "operationalize" how to do this in terms of assignments). Then Lamb gives that really great account of the abbot who wrote about homosexuality for the Episcopalian newsletter. The whole account is just amazing, but some of the best parts of the description include how the abbot "noted the passages in Leviticus and Romans often used to attack homosexuality; without denying what they say, he also provided us with broader contexts in which to interpret them, thus showing that the primary issues may not be homosexuality.... Later, he noted that we are to empty 'ourselves of all that makes us want to push others away just because they are different... If our identity is threatened by the difference of another that is a signal of our own need to empty ourselves of that identity, in the faith that we will discover ourselves more deeply in the other person and in God'" (163). That sounds almost Rogerian. Lamb goes on to recount that the abbot "never took an explicit position; the emphasis instead was on broadening the context in which the discussion takes place, creating openings for anyone except possibly the most diehard on either side" (ibid).

It seems as though one could construct a counter-narrative to that which I have given here, in which Lassner follows Lamb and qualifies Lamb's "empathetic" argument, rather than the other way around (I'd say that Lamb's account of the maternal is empathetic; she even says on page 158--quoting herself-- that "A central notion is that of 'attentive love or loving attention': 'Loving attention is much like empathy, the ability to think and feel as the other.'" Again, I'd say that the two are in dialogue--that I find productive elements in both.
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On DeLuca:

A great piece--I've photocopied it and passed it along to a few friends of my moms who are activists in the queer community, simply because of the rich language he uses. And overall it's a way "in" to reading the body as another example of a text, just like print, film and television, advertisements, etc.--and as DeLuca notes, as seeing the body as engaged in "constitutive rhetoric: the mobilization of signs, images, and discourses for the articulation of identities, ideologies, consciousnesses, communities, publics, and cultures... [they] constitute a nascent body rhetoric that deploys bodies as a pivotal resource for the crucial practice of public argumentation" (226-7). There's pedagogical value to be found here.

The discussion of media coverage was great, too--"as radical groups questioning societal orthodoxies, they can expect news organizations to frame them negatively as disrupters of the social order.. [but] What they do have control over... is the presentation of their bodies in the image events... Their bodies, then, become not merely flags to attract attention for the argument but the site and substance of the argument itself" (227). This suggests--for me any way--examining the framing of media reports on such events, much like Bri did with the story on the British twins.

I loved the rich descriptions that DeLuca uses for ACT UP and Queer Nation. Page 235 is just full of quotable text: "The body is front and center in their arguments for it is the body that is at stake--its meanings, its possibilities, its care, and its freedoms. In their protest actions, the activists use their bodies to rewrite the homosexual body as already constructed by dominant mainstream discourses--diseased, contagious, deviant, invisible... The force of the body makes it a sublime and contested site in cultures, subject to feverish and multiple modes of disciplining and constructing."

Here DeLuca cites Foucault's _Discipline and Punish_ and _The History of Sexuality: Volume I_, along with Alphonso Lingis, but I'd like to comment a little further by way of quoting from Foucault (no such luck on getting digressions out of the way early), as his account of discourse and power is productive in tying DeLuca back to Lamb. In _The History of Sexuality: Volume I_, page 43, Foucault notes asserts that

"As defined by the ancient civil or canonical codes, sodomy was a category of forbidden acts; their perpetrator was nothing more than the judicial subject of them.... Homosexuality appeared as one of the forms of sexuality when it was transposed from the practice of sodomy onto a kind of interior androgyny, a hermaphrodism of the soul. The sodomite had been a temporary aberration; the homosexual was now a species."

This radical shift was the result of discourses concerned with disciplining and constructing the body, which emerged in the nineteenth-century:

"There is no question that the appearance in the nineteenth-century psychiatry, jurisprudence and literature of a whole series of discourses on the species and subspecies of homosexuality, inversion, pederasty, and 'psychic hermaphrodism' made possible by a strong advance of social controls into this area of 'perversity'; but it also made possible the formation of a 'reverse' discourse: homosexuality began to speak in its own behalf, to demand its legitimacy or 'naturality' be acknowledged, often in the same vocabulary, using the same categorie by which it was medically qualified. There is not, on the one side, a discourse of power, and opposite it, another discourse that runs counter to it. Discourses are tactical elements or blocks operating in the field of force relations; there can exist different and even contradictory discourses within the same strategy; they can, on the contrary, circulate without changing their form from one strategy to another, opposing strategy. We must not expect the discourses on sex to tell us, above all, what strategy they derive from, or what moral divisions they accompany, or what ideology - dominant or dominated - they represent: rather we must question them on the two levels of their tactical productivity (what reciprocal effects of power and knowledge they ensure) and their strategic integration (what conjunction and what force relationship make their utilization necessary in a given episode of the various confrontations that occur). In short, it is a question of orienting ourselves to a conception. of power which replaces the privilege of the law with the view-point of the objective, the privilege of prohibition with the viewpoint of tactical efficacy, the privilege of sovereignty with the analysis of a multiple and mobile field of force relations, wherein far-reaching, but never completely stable, effects of domination are produced" (101-2).

To take up DeLuca once again (still on 235), I think this is amazing prose: "In our culture at this time, homosexual bodies are a particularly hot site for they serve as the necessary foil for heterosexuality and yet are evidence of the failure of discursive disciplining and the excess of bodies...they are marked not due to physical features but sexual practices, which provokes erotophobia... [and] represents an especially potent boundary transgression that violates the hegemonic discourse of heterosexuality and threatens the social order." DeLuca goes on to quote Judith Butler--in her brilliant _Gender Trouble_--who herself coined the term "heteronormativity" to describe the hegemony that DeLuca is discussing.

DeLuca goes on to point out that "The penalty for exposing one's gay body ranges from verbal abuse to physical beatings to death... Thus, by their very presence at a protest the activists are enacting a defiant rhetoric of resistance." And on page 236, DeLuca notes that "The same-sex kiss-in ups the ante. The romantic kiss, the portal to heterosexuality, marriage, children, and family values that function as the ideological bedrock of patriarchy is subverted, made 'bi'.... As a performance of gay or lesbian sexuality, it violates two taboos--the taboo of homosexuality and the backup taboo on visibility." That's a great insight--this "double bind" taboo schema that he posits here. It brings to mind the oft-heard "tolerant" observation, "I don't mind gay people..." followed by "as long as they act straight in public" or "I just don't want to see it." This sentiment has been appropriated by gay activists and redeployed publicly--on t-shirts and bumper stickers--as "I don't mind straight people as long as they act gay in public," a strategy reflecting the quote by Judith Butler (from _Gender Trouble_ once again) that DeLuca cites on 238--that "As imitations which effectively displace the meaning of the original... parodic proliferation deprives hegemonic culture and its critics of the claim to naturalized or essential gender identities." DeLuca puts a fine point on the matter in quoting Berlant and Freeman: "Being queer is not about a right to privacy: It is about the freedom to be public," and, as DeLuca adds, "the freedom to be visible, to exist" (237) and the, quickly afterwards, he goes on to say that, "In using their bodies as billboards to disrupt the straight spaces... activists recreate these spaces as sites for multiple significations of sexuality" (238).
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Curzan and Damour:

A lot of great practical advice in this chapter. As I read, I made a few notes to myself:

pages 106-7 (office hours location): I seem to remember there being a note made at some point discouraging the practice of holding office hours at coffee houses, etc. I must say (because I'm Ed Grimley, apparently) that when I was an undergrad I kind of resented it when people (instructors or otherwise) asked me to meet them off-campus if it was for anything school-related. I don't know why--I like coffee, I don't mind spending money, usually, and I actually love having lunch with friends--but I just didn't like it. Maybe because it usually involved parking and/or walking a great deal to the designated establishment, whereas somewhere on campus, where I probably already was and would be going afterward, was more convenient. I could also see there being a problem with always finding a table--you'd have to be mindful of the time of day, etc. At the same time, I could see the urge to get out of the rooms in downstairs Tate for conferences. There are a couple of professors I know who hold their office hours at Brady... not the most glamorous locale, but I can't think of anything better right now. Suggestions?

page 108 (timing office hours): I agree with Curzan and Damour that office hours should be at times when students can attend. Something that I did for my primary tutoring hours last semester was on the first day I attended class, I brought photocopies of a blank schedule and asked them to fill in times they knew they had classes or other commitments and I used those to find at least one hour that each of them would be free in making up the three primary tutoring hours. I don't know if it really did much good... but maybe it will work better when it's actually my students (just an idea).

page 109 (Ending office hours): Like Claire, I found the discussion of strategies for dealing with students misusing office hours to be helpful. But I did have one "objection" while reading this section. I know I'm going to be too much of a push-over, in general, but to me the description given here of stating "politely that your office hours are over" when you're in the middle of meeting with someone seems, well, rude. I think I need Claire to clarify (ha!), because I'm missing something. I know that surely they mean to qualify the discussion a little, and they probably leave it up to the reader to use common sense as to when it's appropriate and when it's not to end office hours in the middle of a discussion with a student. But still, if they're going to mention it at all, it seems like they could be a little more nuanced in describing when it's appropriate and when it's not. They actually go so far as to say that it's okay, though it might be "difficult" when "you are in the middle of a meeting with a student who is angry or upset," to "bserve that your office hours have ended and that you can continue to talk with the student more in the future if necessary." What?!? Reading ahead to the sections they direct you to--"Students with Personal Problems" and "Grade Complaints"--fleshes it out quite a bit and they sound more sympathetic, but this section really threw me.

There is a lot of great, practical advice moving forward, though, much of which dovetails with Bean. I know I’m going to keep going back to both of these texts, even years from now. I have a lot more to say about both but I've come down with what feels like the flu and my head is getting muddled, so I'll stop (for now).