A REINTERVIEW with Geoffrey Sirc, text.

The PreText Conversations held a Re/In/View

with Geoffrey Sirc  about his  article published in P/T

during November, December, January of 1994-1995.
 
Date:         Thu, 10 Nov 1994 10:51:05 -0500 
From:         "Victor J. Vitanza" 
Subject:      REINVW: Announce, Sirc's article

REINVW...


**GEOFF SIRC'S ARTICLE

...

"Writing Classroom as A & P Parking Lot"

...

_______

I will send 5 separate posts of this article, which we will be
doing a RE/INTER/VIEW of.

Each post is very long.  In print, the article ranges from
pp. 27-70 (*PRE/TEXT* 14.1-2 [1993])... about 43 pages.

If you already have a copy of this article, or if you are not
interested in reading or joining in on the re/inter/view, then,
just delete the 5 files that are marked

        REINVW:  Sirc, part 1
        REINVW:  Sirc, part 2
        etc.

If you already have a copy but would like to FORWARD
these files to a colleague, you may do so without violating the
copyright.

In sending lengthy files, we have found, as others have,
that transmission can be poor.  If this is the case this
time, we will continue to attempt to send the files.  If you
receive corrupted files and would like us to send one or
more to you individually, please drop us a note with your
eddress.

The article has a number of diacritical marks in it that we are
not able to send; we have either omitted marks or inserted
them following a letter.

We will announce when the REINVW of this article begins,
and for those of you who have not participated or observed
a reinvw, we will attempt to demonstrate HOW it is to be
conducted.  Remember REINVWs are part of the Cycles
Project and, therefore, protocols and formatting must be
followed.  Posts that do not follow formatting will not be
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If you have a local reading group or collective, you might want
the members to read this article, prepare questions, and then
join in on the discussion.  Again feel free to forward the files
to colleagues.  We want to encourage all of our colleagues
to read and discuss articles in this interactive format.

Once again, I will send instructions later on where and how
to post.

If I can be of any help, please drop me a note.

-----victor j. vitanza, moderator, REINVW
SOPHIST@UTARLG.UTA.EDU
=========================================
Date:         Thu, 10 Nov 1994 10:54:50 -0500 
From:         "Victor J. Vitanza" 
Subject:      REINVW: Sirc, part 1

"Writing Classroom as A & P Parking Lot"

by Geoffrey Sirc

_PRE/TEXT_ 14.1-2 (1993):  27-70

(copyright victor j. vitanza and geoffrey sirc [_pre/text_] 1994)


But we are unable to seize the human facts.  We fail to see
them where they are, namely in humble, familiar, everyday
objects: the shape of fields, of ploughs.  Our search for the
human takes us too far, too 'deep,' we seek it in the clouds
or in mysteries, whereas it is waiting for us, besieging us
on all sides.

        --Henri Lefebvre


1. Text as Architecture/Urban Planning
        I am calling for a new urbanism in composition studies.
An architecturally-based metaphor, focused around the notion
of city planning and city life, seems justified to use in discussing
the textual spaces we demand our students inhabit. Bataille, for
example, has criticized architecture in the way it imposes an order
on people. As Hollier reads Bataille: "Architecture captures
society in the trap of the image it offers, fixing it in the specular
image it reflects back. . . . Architecture does not express the soul
of societies but rather smothers it" (47). Such a reading points to
my desire for a new urbanism, in the way I find composition's
cultural spaces cramped and uninhabitable. I want to open compo-
sition studies up to the same urban responsibilities (and possi-
bilities) as architecture. We already draw on the architectural meta-
phor in our field: we talk about designing curricula, about the class-
room as communal space where meaning is constructed socially;
we use the notion of writer as bricoleur/euse; indeed, Halloran has
even commented on "the very notion of 'structure' [in compo-
sition], which suggests a quasi-architectural three-dimensional
ordering of parts" (172-73). And anyway, the precedent is already
there to read the one theory in terms of the other: Vincent Scully
has praised Robert Venturi's Complexity and Contradiction in
Architecture for "its significant introduction of several important
modes of literary criticism into architectural writing" (in Venturi, C
& C 12). Venturi, then, shows it is possible to look at the compo-
sition of a building qua composition, to give the building a textu(r)al
analysis. I would like to return the favor, in a sense, and use a few
ideas in architectural theory (especially as they relate to city-plan-
ning)
in order to read the scene of the writing classroom. Such a view is
an attempt to bring a field back down to earth, to a grounding in
everyday life. I want to reconfigure the landscape of the writing
classroom around the very notion of landscape, to reposition the
architectonics of college writing more strictly according to architec-
ture. (Such work is in the spirit of Irmscher's directive that compo-
sitionists "pursue analogues, particularly from other disciplines"
87.) As part of my discussion, I want to get some Modern and
Postmodern arche'texts speaking to each other: to orchestrate
my dialogue, I've chosen Donald Stewart's "modern textbook
for freshman composition" (1), The Versatile Writer, along with
David Bartholomae's influential article "Inventing the University,"
as representative of the contemporary practices of university
writing instruction (the objection may be raised that Stewart and
Bartholomae should by no means be lumped together, repre-
senting as they do the two antinomies of the academic/express-
ivist continuum; I hope to show, though, that the Modernist trend
in our field renders any such distinctions meaningless). Repre-
senting the voice of Postmodernity (overlaid on a beat from
Venturi, as well as the French theorists of everyday
life) will be some samplings of electronic vox pop--the LANtalk1
of some of my first-year basic writing students, as well as (from the
"real world") the e-mail of an anonymous female worker in a large
computer corporation. I want to theorize these arche'-texts to
show  why I feel the need for a new academic urbanism and also
to begin tracing what the forms of that urbanism might take. I want
to look at the formal texts of our curriculum as the buildings which
form our cityscape, and, as discursive wanderings in and around
those buildings, samplings both from student electronic discus-
sion and "real world" professionspeak. The use of LANtalk is
important because without my experience of teaching writing in
a networked classroom--of having a technology that enables more
fiercely styled verbal interchange from students than essayist
prose allows--I might never have stopped and smelled the roses.
I offer, then, not so much a theoretical perspective on writing
instruction, but a theory from instructed writers, one which has
been informed by the ethos of the objects of our practice and
has attempted to read it back into a more general theory of com-
position.

        First, some notes on the architectural theory of Robert
Venturi, pointing to his desire for new urban concepts. Venturi
reacted against the Modern architectural program, which, for
Vincent Scully,

<> (C & C 9)

Venturi offered a new architectural program, a "theory of ugly and
ordinary" as he called it, using the exact terms with which Modernist
Philip Johnson labeled his work. Modernism, for Venturi, offered
a banal, simplified program of purity, clean lines, and easy unity,
which seemed at odds with the Mannerist, Baroque, and Rococo
buildings he loved, buildings full of "complexity and contradiction,"
as he put it in the title of his first book. To Mies van der Rohe's
famous Modernist dictum "Less is more," Venturi shrugged,
"Less is a bore" (C & C 17).

        An architecture that excluded complexity was one at
odds with the way we actually live everyday. For example, Philip
Johnson's open, clean, almost entirely glass-walled pavilion
houses, for Venturi, would be absurd to actually dwell in, in the
way they "ignore the real complexity and contradiction inherent
in the domestic program--the spatial and technological possi-
bilities as well as the need for variety in visual experience. . . . The
building becomes a diagram of an oversimplified program for
living--an abstract theory of either-or. . . . Blatant simplification
means bland architecture" (C & C 17). History taught Venturi
that architecture is rarely simple and pure, that it often reflects
life in the way (as Dr. Johnson said of Shakespeare's dramas)
"the most heterogeneous ideas are yoked together by vio-
lence." And so he developed his "Gentle Manifesto" for "non-
straightforward architecture":

<>
(C & C 16)

In his first book, a study of architectural form employing the
textual methods of literary criticism to read buildings formally,
Venturi drew on Pop Art to find meaning in the degraded, com-
mercial aspects of the landscape--what he termed the "honky-
tonk elements"--realizing they were not only here to stay, but
that they served (and reflected) people's needs and tastes.
Where Modern architecture viewed the bastardized architectural
hodge-podge of Main Street as an abomination, Venturi asked
honestly, "Is not Main Street almost all right?" (C & C 104). As
proof, he read the buildings and layout of the commercial centers
of town--the seeming contradictions of scale, the use of inflected
fragments, and the arrangement of contrapuntal relationships--
to find the inherent unity and complexity in the vernacular
arche'-text.

        In his second book (written with Brown & Izenour), Venturi
went beyond the formal, reading architectural forms into a theory
of the urban symbolic. He went right to the heart of the beast, the
center of architectural excess and vulgar commercialism, Las
Vegas, in order to see how the modern urban sprawl worked. The
lessons he learned there, he urged on his profession, suggesting
the need (as Brown puts it)

<>
(LLV xvii)

Architects' social coerciveness lay in their preference to change
existing conditions rather than (merely, unheroically) to enhance
them. It should not be a question of imposing values of classical
purity on people's desire for spectacle, but rather learning to make
the spectacular speak as well as possible. Modernists refuse the
vernacular: "I. M. Pei will never be happy on Route 66" (LLV 6).

        Venturi found a valid logic, a coherent program, in Las
Vegas. It was a logic based on cars and fast movement in open
space--meaning, for example, a heightened use of signs (big,
bright, eye-catching, able to be seen from the road) and a scaled-
down notion of architecture (low buildings to help the air-con-
ditioning, neutral design so they don't detract from the signs).
The A&P parking lot became a primal compositional scene for
Venturi:

<>
(LLV 13)

Such a setting, Venturi found, calls for a more complex architect-
ural program, one combining a variety of media beyond simply
light, form, and structure in space. It calls for "an architecture of
bold communication rather than one of subtle expression" (LLV
9). Traditional demarcations get blurred in such an architecture.
One watches, for example, in before-and-after photos, the facade
of the Golden Nugget become cannibalized by its neon sign until
it's unclear whether the building is a sign or the sign is a building.
Modernist theory could not read such a facade because it had
"abandoned a tradition of iconology in which painting, sculpture,
and graphics were combined with architecture. . . . Modern
buildings contained only the most necessary messages, like
LADIES, minor accents begrudgingly applied" (LLV 7). Las Vegas
called for a reading in which attention was paid to moving, rather
than stable, objects; it was inclusive, messy, not exclusive and
simple. Those who term it sprawl do so because its inclusive
pattern is one they cannot yet read.

        Now, why do I call for a new academic urbanism? Be-
cause I have learned from the existing landscape. Students
are there, according to composition texts, somewhere outside
the city limits of writing; we need to get them here, to a place
where they can do certain things with written language and
form that will have a pay-off in the "real world" (or in our notions
of what constitutes their preferred self-development or empower-
ment). But the spaces we train them to design and inhabit are
simplistic, arbitrary, and constrictive. 'Minor accents begrudgingly
applied'? Not my students; they have words plastered all over
themselves, from their clothing brands to their sports team logo's
to their concert T's. It's logo as logos. Our students represent
the grammar and lexicon of Main Street, of the Strip. The sign
grammar of Vegas is theirs naturally. As such, they enter the
puristic Greek Temples of our classrooms as exiles from Main
Street, denied their verbal heritage, their textual homeland.
We take away their status as writers immediately. They are
"students," a term mutually exclusive from "writer": "You have
the choice," Stewart lays down the law, "of thinking like a
student or like a writer" (17). We strip from them all the honky-
tonk elements they may have brought in with them from Main
Street, chastening them for their values in tones ranging from
the patronizing to the hostile:

<> (Stewart 6)

        What poor substitutes for real diversity are the wild rain-
bows of dyed hair and other external differences that tell the
observer nothing about what is inside (64). . . . As it now stands,
students have powerful images of what a perfect body is and
pursue it incessantly. But deprived of literary guidance, they
no longer have any image of a perfect soul, and hence do not
long to have one. They do not even imagine that there is such
a thing. (Bloom 67)

Ironically, it is in the name of authenticity that we rob them of
their native Main Street tongue:

<> (Stewart 13)

Donald Stewart will never be happy with "Route 66." Students'
self-identification with pop trash is not part of our preferred
program for their authentic, empowered voice; neither is working
out or buying clothes. Thus we raze the student landscape, until
it is as flat as Bloom's "clean slate"; then we give them the blue-
prints for our temples and demand they (re)produce their new
(already colonized) cityscape likewise. It's the (auto)piazzafication
of Main Street. How can we expect people to care very pas-
sionately about erecting our grand monuments on the still-freshly
agent-oranged ruins of their homeland? Heidegger: "Only if we
are capable of dwelling, only then can we build" (160). Guiding
composition's practice is what Venturi reacted against in his
urbanism and what LANtalk often stands in opposition to: a pro-
gram of the universalization of the existing landscape. Our univer-
sal notions of good writing become a totalizing program of design
control. Our program is to clone students into Optimal Verbal Tech-
nology cyborgs called Versatile or Successful Writers. As archi-
tectural critic Kenneth Frampton notes, "Modern building is now
so universally conditioned by optimal technology that the possi-
bility of creating significant urban form has become extremely
limited," with such conditioning representing "the victory of univer-
sal civilization over locally inflected culture" (17). And so he calls for
an "architecture of resistance" according to strategies of "critical
regionalism," which is exactly the kind of anti-architecture that
students use in the unconstrained patois of their networked chit-
chat. A program of universalization results from a bland notion of
the possibilities of architecture, one that does not admit complexity.
To look at architecture in terms of complexity is to see Versailles in
the A & P parking lot: it's to see the (other) story that dwells in the
(purported) story. Letting the other speak (allos + agoreuei) is the
very definition of allegory, the textual strategy composition studies
refuses in its consideration of student writing. And allegory is
precisely the view an architectural reading affords: "an unmistak-
ably allegorical impulse has begun to reassert itself in various
aspects of contemporary culture. . . . Allegory is also manifest in
the historical revivalism that today characterizes architectural
practice" (Owens 204). It's the A & P parking lot as allegory for
Versailles, not metaphor or metonym (which would privilege one
referent--allegory neutralizes both/all referents). The relationship
is one of displacement or substitution, not reference or represen-
tation; it's palimpsestic rather than hermeneutic.

**PART 2 OF SIRC'S ARTICLE FOLLOWS...
=========================================
Date:         Thu, 10 Nov 1994 11:16:40 -0500 
From:         "Victor J. Vitanza" 
Subject:      REINVW:  Sirc, part 2

**PART 2 OF SIRC'S ARTICLE...

2. Writing as De'rive/Urban Living
        I chose an architectural frame through which to view my
profession because of its central importance (like writing) in
determining how people live, specifically how they inhabit their
world and how it inhabits them. That latter aspect, the impact of
architecture on people, is the aspect most interesting to the
situationist theorists. Architecture, for the situationist, is only
important in how it contributes to the liberation of everyday life
for people, a sentiment expressed, for example, by Ivan
Chtcheglov (in Knabb, Situationist International Anthology)
in his "Formulary for a New Urbanism":

<> (SIA 2)

Chtcheglov takes as an example the Surrealist painter Giorgio
de Chirico, whose urbanistic vision, because it was not pre-
sented in traditional architectural forms and genres, went un-
used by urban planners, who could not see the imperative for
its use in social practice. Chtcheglov, bemoaning the opportu-
nity lost by such neglect, reflects on the way visionary archi-
tectural design is the single-most important factor in the pro-
ject to reshape the world:

<>

<> (SIA 3)

That spectrum of human desires, forces, etc., is referred to by
situationists with the term psychogeography, defined as "the
study of specific effects of the geographical environment, con-
sciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of in-
dividuals" (SIA 45). Debord, for example, gives a brief overview
of the psychogeographic effects of the general city plan of
Paris on human emotions:

<> (SIA 5)

The situationist program starts from a realization that the grammar
of contemporary cities results in impoverished psychogeographic
effects. Debord: "First of all we think the world must be changed.
We want the most liberating change of the society and life in which
we find ourselves confined" (SIA 17). The urban landscape needs
changing, which would affect the life within it, and alienating
writing
practices represent a key goal in the renewal project: "the only
interesting venture is the liberation of everyday life, not only in
the perspectives of history but for us and right away. This entails
the withering away of alienated forms of communication" (SIA 33).

        Situationist urban theory can illuminate our understand-
ing of the behavior of the writers we teach. The way students
actually inhabit the writing classroom's cityscape is very much in
keeping with the situationist notion of the de'rive, the method
used to chart a city's psychogeography:

<>(Marcus 127)

Apparent in the majority of composition's arche'-texts are efforts
to control consumption, put up traffic signals to style the student-
de'rive according to a notion of pedagogical importance or useful-
ness (i.e., we will never allow our writing classroom's cobblestones
to be fully ripped up in order to expose the beach beneath them).
Classroom cities are subject to constant surveillance, ready to
contain any instance of the student everyday manifesting itself.
So Bruffee, for example, becomes Haussmann when, out of a
perceived need to "reapportion freedom" (637), he plasters his
cityscape with all sorts of regulatory signs in order to evoke the
verbal flow he deems necessary to ensure the success of the
collaborative model in student discussion. Students' psychogeo-
graphic ramblings within a given textual space (if they can ramble
at all) are curtailed sharply. The traffic is strictly one-way, and only
on the main(-point) roads:

1. What is the "point" of the paper? What does it say? What posi-
        tion does it take?
2. How does it make its point? What does it do to defend or
        explain its position?
3. Is the paper related to any issue raised so far in this course?
        Is so, which? If not, what context of issues is the paper
        related to?
4. What are the strong and weak points in the paper? What do
        you like about it? If what you read was a draft, what sug-
        gestions would you make to the writer for revising it?
        (638n)

But the unwanted trash we vigilantly try to keep off our pedagogi-
cal streets turns out to be our most valuable natural resource--exu-
berance. Desire remains the key component lacking in most com-
position theory. Wiener, for example, has eight points to consider
in determining the guidelines for setting up an effective moment
of collaborative learning; these points all relate to theoretical con-
cepts of task, time, setting, and the like, with no mention of pas-
sion or desire (60-61). Situationists, on the other hand, offer more
useful composition theory; they have only one ground rule for
constructing what sound like beneficial models for a writing class,
situations in which "the role played by a passive or merely bit-part
playing 'public' . . . constantly diminish[es], while that played by
those who cannot be called actors, but rather, in a new sense of
the term, 'livers,' must constantly increase," and that guideline is
based on deep desires:

<> (SIA 43)

This, by the way, is the most persuasive argument for the use of
network technology in the composition class: it can channel (and
capture) a group of students' writing off-the-top-of-the-head. It
provides a textual moment that was never there before and may
never be there again, one unmediated by the acculturated crud
of received formal ideas regarding writing; maybe it's merely the
passage of a few people through a rather brief moment in time,
but it's a moment that can be fully inhabited more than most
writing
assignments. In blurring the distinction between oral and written,
creating a kind of creole of conversation and prose, the network
allows for writing as de'rive; allows, in fact, the de'rive to count as
writing, to replace the (uni)formalism of standard exposition. It is
a true situationist composing medium. I prefer writing as road
map
to strange, new places over writing that simply charts again the
same, well-worn ground. Classroom collaborative work done
according to Bruffee and Wiener, with its conventional task-
orientation, is too safe, too already-done--snapshots from a
package-tour vacation ("Are we having fun yet?") that's already
been taken a hundred times before, now being offered one
more time. It's more ritual than lived situation; it can only be
acted out, with some students better rehearsed than others.

        Keep traffic signs in class to a minimum, I've noticed,
and the results are charts of the student-drift, the student
flaneurian imaginary. One of the first things observed is that
the traditional on-task, peer-collaborative response group has
maybe a fifty percent chance of staying on-task anyway, and
when it does students either give each other pleasantly vague
encouragement, manifest their confusion, or engage in harsh
instances of conversation-as-confrontation (Sirc & Reynolds).
When they do stay on-task, it's with an air of tired duty (Scott:
"are we close to done yet?"). The moments when they go off-
task become more fascinating psychogeographic maps,
showing what they feel are the true avenues of attraction: the
Strips, naturally--spectacular topics like sex, drinking, drugs,
the media, and popular culture (movies, music, TV, ads, and
clothes). A conversation between three women students, for
example, shows that a lively, gossipy account of the past week-
end's romantic encounters is far more interesting than the pre-
scribed discussion of their drafts; they're in Strip-mode, erecting
a portable chunk of Main Street--in this case, it's a movie theatre-
front: the repeated punctuation and orthographic elements dot
their prose like lines of flashing marquee bulbs; their sexually
suggestive topics read like lurid movie-stills used to hype the
teen romance now playing; and markered and spray-painted
over the theatre-front, adding another layer to the urban mega-
text-ure, are graffiti referring either to pop culture (Gumby/SNL,
D & D) or sex:

KELLY:  I think that Darrin is a really nice guy, Troy
                and I are going downhill. He was with her
                on Friday and Saturday? He told me when I
                talked to him on the phone that they weren't
                going out anymore, That little scam-
                        mer!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! That was
 Tsday!

AMY:            ohhhh nooooooooo its mr bill no im
                "GUMBY DAMN IT"
                kelly stop biting your nails... are you ner-
                vous???????

LAURIE: When did you talk to him on the phone? I'll
                find out for sure if he is or  not from Dan
                Ramberg

KELLY:  Amy I didn't know you were playing now
                too?

AMY:            playing? is this dungeons and dragons
                PLAYING WITH WHAT?

KELLY:  Cool as hell, He told me on the phone,
                Thursday. He gave me his number a while
                ago, He is always telling me to call him,
                what should I do???????

AMY:            MYYYY Kelly you are really getting to know
                the computer now you look like a normal
                secretary

KELLY:  Amy, you better tell me what happened with
                you and Marty last night, did you fuck or
                what?

This conversation goes on for four pages' worth of transcript;
getting increasingly vulgar and, concurrently, aware of panoptical
instructor surveillance policing their desire: "hello," types Amy,
at one point, mimicking the teacher, "this is [the instructor] and i'd
appreciate it if everyone would work on their papers instead of
screwing around." They will write nothing, of course, this lively
in their formal essays. Such LANtalk reveals "students . . . speak-
ing in their own voices about things that counted for them"
(Macrorie 21). Roger writes a paper on MTV, and in discussion his
group blandly, politely circles around it for a few lines until Joel,
a neo-hippie who always wears his blonde hair tied in a bandana
and sports his NORML button, takes offense at Roger calling
people who watch MTV "Deadheads." After Roger clarifies he
meant the term as in "dullard," not "Grateful Dead fan," the next
two pages leave Roger's paper far behind to rap on the Dead's
popularity. In fact, "rapping" is the right word for it; I thought one
of the best instances of collaboration was when four students
dropped peer-discussion and, each taking a turn, did a 20-line
rap song on Mother Theresa.

        The networked conversations my students have that
seem more traditionally academic are the ones which occur
as general discussions around topics that deal with reading
they've done. Unmediated by the task-screen of an assigned
essay, they're freewheeling de'rives, showing the precise
points of interest and aversion for them in the material. So
when we read Allan Bloom, for example, their network discus-
sion becomes an architecture of resistance focused on how
wrong Bloom is about the books one needs to have read or
the inherent dangers in rock music. In these conversations,
the student discourse perfectly mirrors the contemporary urban
verbalscape--the operative grammar is the sound bite, the T-shirt/
bumper-sticker slogan, ad copy, graffiti, stadium bannerspeak.
So Pete's take on Bloom: "He says that Rock is a form of mastur-
bation, yet I've never climaxed while listening to ZZ Top," or
Dreanna's: "It seems like Bloom was isolated for about 20 years."
In another session, Andy gets a little bored with the discussion
of how revisionist Vietnam War movies may or may not misre
present history and drops out to put up a billboard for his current
favorite film: "the world's a media circus. get back to nature.
see . . . THE BEAR." There's a reality in these discussions that
I seldom see in their standard papers. The point doesn't seem
so much how we can get them to transfer that natural exuberance
to their academic writing, as how we can get academic writing to
restyle itself so as to better fit their exuberance. Besides, the
larger media culture doesn't bother to expand or elaborate in
their glitzy little sound bites, so why should my students?

        The problem lies in narrow notions of form and function.
Faigley has already shown how, even across a broad range of
compositionists, the kind of writing seen as "good" is surprisingly
similar. That should come as no surprise, for at the heart of compo-
sition lies an assumption "that certain qualities are common to all
effective nonfiction prose[:] . . . significance, clarity, unity,
economy,
and acceptable usage" (Hairston 1); an affirmation of "a funda-
mental similarity of values in the forms of discourse throughout the
academy" (Marius 28). These qualities and values represent a
program of universalization at the level of form and meaning, an
aesthetic in service to a very particular beautiful. Macrorie captures
the problem with teaching writing under the grammar-of-the-monu-
ment when he speaks of the "huge gray result" (13) it produces.
Whether the theorist is an expressivist or a cultural critic, the "real"
of writing becomes the form-as-reproducible, as already written.
It is no wonder, then, that Stewart ("accomplished writers develop
a sense of which [stylistic options] will work in which situations
and then write accordingly" 7) comes to sound much like
Bartholomae (for whom students "mimic the 'distinctive register'
of academic discourse [in order] to actually and legitimately do
the work of the discourse" "Inventing" 162). The very distinction
between academic and expressivist writing is bogus because
both obey the same logic of structure and function; the texts
and students in these courses are always in service to empty,
boring uses--discoveries of authentic voices or (equally mystic,
secret) patterns of discursive power. A true notion of "power" in
writing, in the sense of sovereignty, has nothing to do with use
and servility: "Life beyond utility is the domain of sovereignty"
(Bataille, Vols. 2 & 3, 198). The so-called expressivist/academic
antinomy represents simply two movements in a single turn in
university writing, in much the same way Bataille saw architecture
turn from being the expression or image of social order to the
formal mechanism by which that order was imposed (Hollier 47).
Students must always "write accordingly" . . . "legitimately": so
the official ("real-world") documentary permanently held-over
on every screen at the Composition Octaplex is an anti-parody,
a non-allegory--a reverse-image loony-toon in which the Road
Runner stars as John Law, vigilantly patrolling the streets of
Vegas in hopes of catching that "common" (Bartholomae,
"Inventing" 151) criminal, the Cashinahuan Coyote, White
Shoes (played by Bart Simpson).

        Both compositionist camps, then, are part of the
"bread-alone" school, in which writing supplies the necessary,
the real, whether an authentically-voiced solution to a local
composing occasion or a Foucauldian exercise in ferreting
out the microphysics of power. But neither man nor woman
lives (or writes) by bread alone, and so these two philosophical
camps might as well be one for all either of them have to
mention of the life beyond bread--what Bataille (Vols. 2 & 3)
variously terms the miraculous or the divine, and what Lyotard
calls the sublime or the unpresentable. The aesthetics of the
bread-alone school posit that there is a matching referent for a
given idea; one can only really write if one can reproduce well,
either an authentic passage or an academic tone. A production-
as-reproduction aesthetic results, for example, in that broad
range of Faigley's Coles & Vopat teacher-informants sharing
surprisingly similar literary tastes--all using words like "honest"
and "true" in their discussions of student texts because their
evaluation of writing is based on this referential correspondence
between their experience of the Idea (authenticity, academic
register) and the student's written approximation of it as case.
Those Hairstonian qualities, then, serve as criteria used to
judge a faithful rendering; teaching under such an aesthetic
becomes a matter of taste, of evaluating how well the "beautiful"
(whether romantic or political) is represented. It makes more
sense, however, to think of students as writing allegories of
composition rather than metonymic representations; looked
at that way they suddenly have the coherence Venturi saw
in the previously-degraded megatexture of Main Street: "at
one stroke the profound vision of allegory transforms things
and works into stirring writing" (Benjamin 176). Everyone from
Benjamin ("Allegory thereby declares itself to be beyond beauty,"
178) to Bono ("'taste is the enemy of art.' There's a point where
you find yourself tiptoeing as an artist, and then you know that
you're in the wrong place" Light 45) knows beauty and taste are
outmoded criteria to bring to an analysis of composition. I bring
in Bono because the writing classroom under the bread-alone
program resembles nothing so much as a lame parody of MTV,
as seen by the TV show designed, in effect, to be a lame parody
of MTV, Puttin' on the Hits: writing in the bread-alone compo-
sition class becomes lip-syncing the standards, and teaching
becomes a question of judging the authenticity of the imitation.
Architectural critic Michael Sorkin's take on that old program
sounds very much like the dynamic of the contemporary writing
class, in the way the everyday "autoroboticizes" into hyperreality:
"[C]onsecrated to the serial realization of simulation, Puttin' on
the Hits . . . focuses on the passage of quotidian citizens into
the realms of celebritydom by their self-transformation into the
figures of rock 'n' roll superstars, . . . judged by a panel of media
business operatives according to the criteria of 'appearance,
' 'lip sync,' and (sic) 'originality'" (167-168). But the reality beyond
bread has no corresponding figure to reproduce. The sublime,
as Lyotard notes, deals with "ideas of which no presentation is
possible. . . . [T]hey prevent the formation and the stabilization
of taste. They can be said to be unpresentable" (78). The bread-
alone theorists, in wanting to supply reality (or, rather, "reality"),
focus on theories of text production (rather than, say, text con-
sumption or text seduction). And so technique--with its etymo-
logical origins of bringing forth, producing--becomes the key to
their aesthetics. For Heidegger, "the nature of the erecting of
buildings cannot be understood adequately" (159) in terms of
mere technique; the nature of building is caught up in the more
sublime notion of "letting dwell" (160). Bread-alone teachers,
then, rely on notions of "true" and "honest" because their plea-
sure lies in the recognition of the representative form. "Ironically
we glorify originality through replication of the forms of Modern
masters" (LLV 148). Even when the unpresentable is acknowl-
edged in their aesthetic, it is as absence, as nostalgia for the
(missing) sublime: power, authentic voice, or, say, Bloom's panic-
realization that "they no longer have any image of a perfect soul"
(67). The sublime is not crucial to their aesthetic, form is (just as
power is not really crucial to the cultural critics, merely its discursive
patterns). Traditional discussions of literacy, in general, have little
of the sublime in them; so one must go outside the formal bounds
of composition--to architecture, for example--in order to better
(allegorically) read the field and its students. Art criticism in
general offers more rewarding theory relative to the sublime, as
seen in this definition by Joseph Kosuth: "Anything can be art.
Art is the relations between relations, not the relations between
objects" (Fischl & Saltz 30).

PART 3 OF SIRC'S ARTICLE FOLLOWS...
========================================
Date:         Thu, 10 Nov 1994 11:27:20 -0500 
From:         "Victor J. Vitanza" 
Subject:      REINVW:  Sirc, part 3

PART 3 OF SIRC'S ARTICLE...

        If art today, as Owens suggests, is "unmistakably
allegorical" (204), then student-writing-as-art must contain
the megatextural element of allegory. Bartholomae's reading
of those student placement essays in "Inventing the University"
(particularly his reading of the papers by the writers he deems
less successful, like White Shoes, for whom there appears no
hope, and Clay Model, caught halfway between expressivism
and the academic) can serve to trace the implications of com-
position's denial of allegory. If allegory is one story doubled by
another, then an allegorical reading of White Shoes' paper,
written in response to the tedious prompt "Describe a time when
you did something you felt to be creative. Then, on the basis of
the incident you have described, go on to draw some general
conclusions about 'creativity'" (136), might be, "You give me a
cheesy writing task, I invest about this much time doing it, reach-
ing for the first thing I can think of." But the grammar of the monu-
ment crushes such an allegory, treating it solely as representation-
manque', detailing how the naive writer foolishly imagined him-
self in the wrong discourse, "the 'great man' theory" (151) of
history rather than the (Bartholomae-preferred) power/knowl-
edge theory. And so the paper's entrails are poured over by
the high priest to divine further proof of the power of the gods
of the monument. White Shoes is a Strip-student, though, far
more interested in football than schooling, a student for whom
the bread-alone hook of "you must do well on this writing prompt,
your scholastic future depends on it" appeals not at all. No one
from the Strip could take a topic like that "creative/creativity" one
seriously. To flout it makes sense; it's the mandate of Hebdige's
street-punks, "throw your self away before They do it for you"
(32). Bread-alone theorists can't think beyond the orgy of signi-
fication represented by the placement test; but White Shoes is
in Baudrillard's post-orgy mode of "What are you doing after the
placement test?" ("Vanishing Point" 189). Why in the world should
he let something like a dull writing prompt interrupt the pleasures
of his football fantasies?

        Bartholomae tries vainly, like Stewart does with Harold,
who "thinks and speaks in the language of TV beer-commercials"
(vii), to cram the allegorical excess into the strictly defined repre-
sentational system of his aesthetics, in which a certain genre can
only appear as a certain genre: e.g., "a chair's address is a chair's
address" (Reply 129), and not, say, a Jimmy Stewart impression
(North 113-14). Placement test essays just don't matter for Strip-
writers unless they can be allegories of football glory. Excess will
always cause implosion in the system which cannot process it. So
when the high priests do poke through the entrails of White Shoes'
verbal corpse, what they read (and deny) is their own doom: "The
allegorical supplement is not only an addition, but also a replace-
ment. . . . Hence the vehemence with which modern aesthetics--
formalist aesthetics in particular--rails against the allegorical supple-
ment, for it challenges the security of the foundations upon which
aesthetics is erected" (Owens 215). The logic of allegory is not
composition's X = X, but X = Y: "any person, any object, any relation-
ship can mean absolutely anything else" (Benjamin 175). To those
who would refuse the supplement, who would strictly curtail Benja-
min's parameters for allegory, an earnest entreaty--less really is a
bore.

        Bartholomae has the right impulses ("I am constantly im-
pressed by the patience and good will of our students" 135) for
the wrong reasons ("He is trying on the discourse even though
he doesn't have the knowledge that would make the discourse
more than a routine, a set of conventional rituals and gestures"
136). That is, Bartholomae sees the otherspeak, he sees the
second story, but it's as antecedent, as referent, not as excess,
not as palimpsest, not as replacement; the other story speaks
only as a failed attempt to do the right thing. Smack dab in the
middle of the vast expansive texture of allegory's wide-open sub-
stitution Bartholomae stubbornly erects yet another instance of
the modern composition program, the high enclosing form of sym-
bolism, to be styled, in this case, according to the blueprints for
an objective correlative of creativity and some reflexive exegesis.
Another modernist franchise spoils the wild prairie, with writing
permissible only on sanctioned streets in the now-occupied ter-
ritories. Students must place themselves "in the context of what
has been said and what might be said . . . [and not] solely in the
context of [their] experience" (152). It's writing as channeling.
Because he refuses the allegorical reading of his placement es-
says, Bartholomae misses everything outside the bounds of
synecdoche; for instance, Bartholomae wants more "'academic'
conclusions" (137) from Clay Model's paper, but far more tantali-
zing than any conclusions about the process of creativity in that
paper is Clay's brief allusion to the actual model itself, a model
of the earth that's "not of the classical or your everyday model
of the earth" (135)--academic conclusions are already known,
but a new model of the earth sounds pretty wild. The very prompt
used to generate the samples in the "Inventing" study, with its
description/reflection dynamic, asks students for the dull, bland
modernist sort of allegory:

conceived of something added or superadded to the work after
the fact, allegory will consequently be detachable from it. In this
way modernism can recuperate allegorical works for itself, on the
condition that what makes them allegorical be overlooked or
ignored. (Owens 215)

As a result, Bartholomae's hermeneutics interprets Clay Model's
paper only as botched synecdoche, a degraded version of the
" 'local' instance . . . of working out a general debate in the aca-
demy" ("Reply" 130), a franchise-in-ruins. Clay Model, the non-
allegory goes, lacks the power/knowledge necessary to turn his
paper on creativity into a witty, elegant academic turn, he lacks
the arche'-textonics to turn his crude shack into a stunning monu-
ment ("that would make the discourse more than a routine" 136;
"to actually and legitimately do the work of the discourse . . . with
grace and elegance" 162). Composition studies refuses to settle
for the urban; it wants only the urbane. Bartholomae overlooks
(or looks through) the allegory, then, seeing it as mere lacunae,
the missing knowledge that would have enabled the academic
sublime (just as Stewart claims Harold "lacks versatility and authen-
ticity" vii). The palimpsest is rationalized and erased away, and the
only writing left legible is writing that mimics "our prose" (136). Clay
Model becomes the half-way point between student and writer.
He is Frankenstein Monster or cyborg, half old flesh and half new.
It's White Shoes, however, the all-wild, the all-primitive, the least
successful, whose allegory remains unerasable: "Getting him out
of it will be a difficult matter indeed" (151). Like most composition-
ists, Bartholomae prefers the cooked to the raw ("I confess I admire
those dense sentences" 159). In the same way Stewart sees
Harold as thoroughly inhabited by the language of beer commer-
cials, Bartholomae sees White Shoes as the most appropriated by
the everyday, that "conventional rhetoric of the self" (150) that is
"so common" (151). While students like Clay Model appear halfway
"to appropriat[ing] (or be[ing] appropriated by)" (135) OUR
PROSE, they are really halfway to the guillotine; Harold and White
Shoes, meanwhile, are a whole other story.

        All writing courses, regardless of their ideological advo-
cacy, become expressionist, Modernist, when they close on
received notions of form and function. Venturi speaks for all
arche'-texture:

When it cast out eclecticism, Modern architecture submerged sym-
bolism. Instead it promoted expressionism, concentrating on the
expression of architectural elements themselves: on the expres-
sion of structure and function. It suggested, through the image
of the building, reformist-progressive social and industrial aims
that it could seldom achieve in reality. By limiting itself to strident
articulations of the pure architectural elements of space, structure,
and program, Modern architecture's expression has become a dry
expressionism, empty and boring--and in the end irresponsible.
Ironically, the Modern architecture of today, while rejecting explicit
symbolism and frivolous applique' ornament, has distorted the
whole building into one big ornament. (LLV 101, 103)

Even when composition classes are styled around an ideology as
positive and humane as feminism, the writing and the peer-discus-
sion around that writing become "one big ornament" that can be
(re)represented correctly, successfully. Feminist pedagogue Sara
Farris bemoans her student James, described as having "brought
nothing to the class" because he and his group refused to write
and workshop essays accordingly, legitimately. Farris writes them
off, exiles them; as poverty-ridden, they are ones to be avoided:

James's workshop group demonstrates the problem: it routinely
workshopped four essays in less than fifteen minutes and then
looked expectantly at me, waiting for their next task to be assigned.
When I talked to them about what I considered to be a dysfunc-
tional group, they insisted that they got out of their workshop
exactly what they wanted: nothing. . . . Finally, I just let them be.
(306)

If contemporary composition theory offers a dry, banal, simplistic
program, then maybe legitimizing other forms and functions (and
teaching to them), even "frivolous" ones like those of a LANtalk
transcript, might make the landscape less alienating. Because such
texts are highly functional forms; almost all right, indeed. In a discus-
sion of horror movies, there was one large-group strand going on,
and then gradually, after Tracy wondered if anyone had seen Mom-
my Dearest (perhaps because at some level she was applying
everything the large group was saying about the genre of horror
to that film), a sub-strand opened up in which Tracy and five other
students, in about forty lines, did a very nice reading of Joan Craw-
ford as monster. Again, I'm uncomfortable with a response that
would say, OK, now get her to write the traditional academic paper
on "The Spectacular Horror of Domestic Drama: Mother as Movie
Star as Freddie Krueger." It's almost like they did enough of that
paper for now, at least all that's necessary to make the idea a use-
ful one (and the idea is a useful one: it helps my movie-viewing
now to look at any sort of Spectacular Genre film--like a Hollywood
bio-pic--as horror-allegory). The text of their discussion is readable
and workable in several ways at once. Charlie sums up Bloom in a
beautiful sound bite: responding to Tom's comment that Bloom's
a narrow-minded fool, Charlie explains, "ITS because he was
raised in the attic of a cheese factory." I almost don't even need
to read a ritual analytic paper on Bloom from Charlie now; his com-
ment has stayed with me more strongly than any other single line
on Bloom I've read. It's a gospel-comment, an ethic-response; it's
about values and truths and inhabited worlds (not mere intellectual
forms), and it's sublime. LANtalk transcripts can be read according
to a logic named by Lefebvre in the title of one of his early articles:
"Fragments of a philosophy of consciousness."

        Roger shows that the grammar of the Strip is a comfort-
able one for him to use in his formal essays. His analysis of MTV,
entitled, "WMTV (WHOSE MUSIC TELEVISION???) OR GNARLEY
TV OF THE 80'S??," reads like it was written in a car, cruising at a
real clip, d(e')riving through the subject of the music video network,
leaving big signs and little buildings in the wake of his drift. There's
no real specific focus; in fact, there's a lot of focuses--about who
the MTV audience is, how MTV constructs sexuality, the anti-author-
itarian stance of many of its videos, and the presence of African-
Americans on the channel. It's a conceptual Main Street, composed
according to a logic of bold communication, not subtle expression.
None of his points are very well-developed, but the trip down the
Strip is well worth the ride, and the various sign-sentences he uses
to dot the street are terrific, wild-style graphic and really flashy, like
the airbrushed jean-jackets he does as a sideline:

[MTV] has appeal, I'm sure, for a certain segment of the population,
namely Ferris Buehler and his friends, maybe better described as
kids who have nothing better to do.

In between videos they have commercials like the "Playboy Play-
mate Spectacular Video," a must for young studs, do-nothings,
and men of the world whoever they may be.

There is only one video jock who is black, and we all know who
that is, "Downtown Julie Brown," who hosts Club MTV. That's
because all blacks usually come from downtown and can relate,
and her name is Brown for obvious reasons, otherwise it would
have been "Suburban Julie White."

        There's much that's implicit in sentences like that (e.g.,
the line connecting MTV with Ferris Buehler opens up a critique
of class and race and Hollywood films), but do I mind that it's only
left implicit? No, because the implicit is often a valid strategy in
every-
day life, and as Venturi notes, "when form follows function
explicitly,
the opportunities for implicit functions decrease" (C & C 130).
MTV
is almost always rhetorically crucial because students often write
according to the (utterly valid) logic of the televisual, a logic that
renders inapplicable Hairston's "qualities [of] effective nonfiction
prose." For example, why waste time trying to teach Roger re-
ceived, rarified truths about transitions between his barely related
ideas when they're simply not relevant to his program at all? His
effects are best achieved by a different grammar, the rock video's
itself, wherein any succession of images yields de facto text
(Sorkin), instant film-Strip. Roger's compositional question, then,
becomes one of simple architectonics (using technology as op-
posed to mastering technique), mere tinkering with existing
material to build a functional dwelling-place, rather than grandiose
replication and installation. It's students-as-colonized, composing
in the bombed-out ruins of their homeland, with nothing to use
but fragments, shards. As such, the scene is in keeping with the
textual strategy of allegory:

the highly significant fragment, the remnant, is, in fact, the finest
material in baroque creation. For it is common practice in the litera-
ture of the baroque to pile up fragments ceaselessly, without any
strict idea of a goal, and, in the unremitting expectation of a miracle,
to take the repetition of stereotypes for a process of intensification.
(Benjamin 178)

Like video, student-writing-as-allegory employs what Owens calls
"structure as sequence" (207). Modernists won't admit the reality
of writing done according to paratactic juxtaposition, to allegorical
piling-up; they would deny, for example, Virilio's observation that
"ours is a crisis of cutting and joining, a crisis of editing; we have
passed beyond the crisis of montage" (112). Modernists are pre-
cisely in the crisis of montage: how many profess the pastiche?
Writing-as-de'rive is a cruise taken in the unremitting expectation
of a miracle; in its randomness, its suggestiveness, it styles itself
according to nothing except emotional response. The goal is not
academic writing's program of retracing the same steps others have
traced, but taking wholly new steps: one can use the flaneurian
stroll of the de'rive, says Debord, to "draw up hitherto lacking maps
of influences, maps whose inevitable imprecision at this early stage
is no worse than that of the first navigational charts; the only dif-
ference is that it is a matter no longer of precisely delineating
stable continents, but of changing architecture and urbanism"
(SIA 53). It's student writing as psychogeographic allegory for
what they don't like about "our prose."

        Despite what you think of the above examples, clearly
there is less alienation, less apparent exhaustion, in such verbal
texts and interchanges than in, for example, an essay I read by
a student at another university, in which a paper was to be written
on the topic (not-so-surprisingly similar to Bartholomae's "creative/
creativity" prompt), "Define 'boring' and indicate if it is different
from 'being bored.'" It's not just me who thinks such a topic can
produce nothing but exhaustion, it's the student who wrote on
it; in her essay she rambles on for a while, stacking up as many
instances vaguely relating to the topic as she can, mind wander-
ing (she even admits), de'rive-like, through tedious terrain, until
she finally arrives at this point in the paper:

When I can't relate to what's going on I go to sleep or my mind
starts to wander off into another land. My mind does that when
I don't want to do something too.

        For example, this paper, I really think that this topic is
boring because I don't like it and it's making me sleepy. I don't
care about boring people.

On one hand, a paper like this becomes a perfect economy,
with the student using her very exhaustion with the topic as her
material text production. But it seems a short-sighted economic
base for our curricular cities. Part of the existing landscape we
must learn to learn from includes our students' psychogeography.
The LANtalk transcripts, and many of their essays (when desire
bleeds into them), let us read what Debord calls "the passional
terrain of the de'rive" (SIA 50), that vast expansive texture in
which all bread-alone topics are reduced to the splitting of hairs
as to the difference between boring and being bored. A situa-
tionist theory of writing, one responsive to students and the
everyday, would say, if the student's de'rive goes in these vari-
ous directions (sex, parody, television, clothes, etc.), then the
curriculum might best have them theorize those topics rather
than count them as unwanted excess. Such work would be-
come, implicitly, a theory of the university, in this case, of the
university writing curriculum which would proscribe such topics.
Student-de'rive's inevitably imprecise navigational chart as urban
blueprint (student as allegory for de Chirico). Foucault (calling
for "a technique of critical demolition"): "The university system,
however, can be put into question by the students themselves.
At that point criticism coming from the outside, from the theore-
ticians, historians or archivists, is no longer enough. And the
students become their own archivists" (64). Or their own decon-
structionists, dismantling the curriculum at the level of form; for
Bataille, "the taking of the Bastille is symbolic . . . it is hard to ex-
plain this crowd movement other than by the animosity of the
people against the monuments that are their real masters"
(Hollier 47). Student-desire as Godzilla, our curriculum as Tokyo.

END OF 3RD PART OF SIRC'S ARTICLE
==========================================
Date:         Thu, 10 Nov 1994 11:39:07 -0500 
From:         "Victor J. Vitanza" 
Subject:      REINVW: Sirc, part 4

PART 4  PART OF SIRC'S ARTICLE

3. Classroom as Parking Lot/Urban Celebration
        This discursive excess, this part maudite, is really another
word for our system's profit, our exchange value, our credit cycle,
our slave labor, our money burning a whole in our pockets. The
crucial question then becomes our ethos regarding the surplus.
Surplus is the basis of allegory. It's allegory's very status as
excess--
its refusal to be useful, to be in service to--that villifies it: "the
allegorical meaning supplants an antecedent one; it is a supple-
ment. That is why allegory is condemned" (Owens 205, emphasis
mine). Bataille builds his theory of general economy--a theory of
consumption, not production--around this basic fact of excess-
as-profit:

The living organism, in a situation determined by the play of
energy on the surface of the globe, ordinarily receives more
energy than is necessary for maintaining life; the excess energy
(wealth) can be used for the growth of a system (e.g., an organ-
ism); if the system can no longer grow, or if the excess cannot be
completely absorbed in its growth, it must necessarily be lost with-
out profit; it must be spent, willingly or not, gloriously or catastro-
phically. (Vol. 1: 21)

Obviously, based on the number of times I and others have
watched classroom discourse go off-task, our curricular system
cannot absorb students' energy; they are too much in the every-
day--the too-live crew--for our system to process. Does that imply,
then, that the system of our curriculum has stopped growing? It
seems that way, when we look at the Ozzie-and-Harriet time-warp
in which we freeze the representation of students and writing.
Here's a primal compositional scene from Stewart's screenplay
for "[A] [T]ypical Monday":

Later in the day, after eating lunch and attending classes, you
find yourself in a meeting of those on the floor of your dorm who
are planning the first social event of the fall. You are selected to
prepare the first draft of a poster which will tell everyone on the
floor what the occasion is, when and where it will be held, and
why it will be a lot of fun. (4)

The writing assignments in our curriculum are on a parallel course
with the rest of the media, "where the highest function of the sign
is to make reality disappear, and at the same time to mask this
disappearance" (Baudrillard, "Vanishing Point" 188), and so
they continue this simulation of student life and identity, disap-
pearing the real desires of our students, constructing body-
snatched simulacra who could actually be impassioned to insert
themselves into a hoary old Twilight Zone plot like Stewart's assign-
ment in Coles & Vopat:

For this assignment I will ask you to be a twentieth-century Gulliver.
You have been shipwrecked and now find yourself forced by
circumstances to live in a strange land, one which calls itself Illinois.
Specifically, you are living in an urban center named Champaign-
Urbana. While you are in this strange city, you take time to
observe the customs and rituals of a unique group of persons
in the society, a group identified as "college students." Now, in
the hope that someday you will return to your native land and
report your observations of these "college students" to your
countrymen, you prepare written accounts of the activities of
this group. (204)

We can already foresee the blank architecture that will result from
such a program of blatant simplification. Assignments currently
fashionable under the rubric of "cultural studies," those designed
to achieve, as Bartholomae & Petrosky paraphrase it, a Freirean
problematization of the student's existential situation (33), are
almost grimmer. Constructing a student, as Bartholomae does,
who would be impassioned to work on the "general critical
project"
("Reply" 130) which he finds intriguing--of how "power and
authority . . . are present in language and culture" ("Reply" 129)--
makes one's curriculum a pedagogy of oppression and poverty,
not of luxury or desire. And as Ross warns,

a politics that identifie[s] with the victims of poverty, a politics
to which intellectuals are prone, [is] doomed to misunderstand
the real utopian desires of "class victims" to identify with abun
dance. If intellectuals today continue to construct a cultural
politics exclusively around themes of deprivation, survivalism,
oppression, victimage, and alienation, then they will never be
able to speak, in a radical accent, the popular language of our
times, which is the language of pleasure, adventure, liberation,
gratification, and novelty. (115)

        The exhaustion in most writing assignments positions
our courses at a point on "the edge of ecstasy and decay"
(Kroker & Cook 10). Students' LANtalk (oral or networked), the
point where their exuberant excess encounters the entropic
exhaustion of "the difference between 'boring' and 'being
bored,' " injects reversibility into our curricular system. The
textual results come crackling across like lightning flashes briefly
illuminating the dark void of our instructional practices, tracing
"a great arc of disintegration and decay against the background
radiation of parody, kitsch, and burnout" (Kroker and Cook 8).
Students, the blessed inertia in our text-production-machines,
are the only vestiges left of the real in most writing classrooms,
which increasingly "leave room only for the orbital recurrence of
models and the simulated generation of difference" (Baudrillard,
Simulations 4). Simulation in composition occurs in the attempt
to mask its disappearance of the real under the sign of "real-world"
writing. Realism is a key modernist trend; its pervasiveness in com-
position makes the field inhospitable to allegory: "by the time
Courbet attempted to rescue allegory for modernity, the line
which
separated them had been clearly drawn, and allegory, conceived
as antithetical to the modernist credo Il faut etre de son temps, was
condemned, along with history painting, to a marginal, purely
historical existence" (Owens 211). Stewart is vraiment de son
temps,
claiming his book represents "the variety of contexts in which
writers work," and promises to share with his student readers
"the attitudes, abilities, and work habits of professional writers and
the ways in which you might adopt them and thus improve your
own writing" (15), and Bartholomae's student has to write in realistic
academic drag, "as though he were a member of the academy or an
historian or an anthropologist or an economist" ("Inventing" 135).
But underlying composition is not so much Real-World Writing as
Real-Wayne's-World Writing: everything is underscored with the
parodic "Not!" E.g., the writing you do in Stewart's class will assist
you in "acquiring both a more objective and a psychologically
deeper sense of the person you are" (Stewart 8) . . . Not! Or
Bartholomae's
students, after learning to be utterly inhabited by academic dis-
course, will somehow be able to solve "the paradox of imitative
originality" (Facts 40) . . . Not! Our cynical students expect that
almost any media voice (except, say, Jane's Addiction) is also
underscored with the parodic opposite (Andy: "the world's a
media circus."). For example, one of the texts I use in my first-
year writing
class is a transcript from a CNN Crossfire show which debated the
issue of censorship around the question of whether or not 2 Live
Crew's record As Nasty as They Want to Be should be sold in
record stores. In the transcript, Pat Buchanan's blustering tirades,
revealing his desire for a simplified, purified, formal program, are
patently parodic for students, most of whom either owned the
record or were very familiar with it:

Michael, I don't understand you liberals. You're concerned about
a little bit of smog that might get in the air and you got all kinds of
federal rules and regulations but you're utterly unconcerned about
the filth that pollutes the popular culture from which the whole
society has to drink. . . . You don't think that this pornography is
pollution of the culture and harmful to the individual? Take a look
at your society, Michael. It's sick because of what it's drinking
from. ("Banned" 12-13)

Students are intuitively hip to Bataille's common-place: "Everyone
is aware that life is parodic and that it lacks an interpretation"
(Visions
5); so they can only look with exhausted disbelief at sentiments
like Buchanan's--or Bloom's: "These are the three great lyrical
themes [of rock music]: sex, hate, and a smarmy, hypocritical
version of brotherly love. Such polluted sources issue in a muddy
stream where only monsters can swim" (74) . . . Not! But Bataille is
almost right; everyone has learned the truth of parody except
bread-
alone compositionists, whose architectonics are heavily, simplis-
tically, representational.

        In fact, since parody is the only natural response (besides
the nothingness of James and his workshop group) to a Modernist
writing curriculum, it becomes an exploitable pedagogy. Only if
one could do it as parody, for example, would performing Stewart's
"Gulliver in Champaign-Urbana" make any sense. For the situa-
tionists, parody (in the form of detournement, recombining pre-
existing textual elements for interesting new programs) was a chief
means of text (recycling-as-)production. The situationist slogan
"Plagiarism is necessary, progress implies it" speaks to the folly of
insisting on a glut of new materials when there's already so much
existing stuff that just needs re-arranging. For the textually canny
situationist,

it would be possible to produce an instructive psychogeographical
detournement of George Sand's Consuelo, which thus decked
out could be relaunched on the literary market disguised under
some innocuous title like "Life in the Suburbs," or even under a
title itself detourned, such as "The Lost Patrol." (It would be a good
idea to reuse in this way many titles of old deteriorated films of
which nothing else remains, or of films which continue to stupefy
young people in the film clubs.) (SIA 11-12)

So, for their parodic scenarios, the situationists put Marxist dia-
logue into the mouths of truckers at a truckstop and substituted
reports of contemporary Klan activities as the new soundtrack of
Griffith's Birth of a Nation because they were working according
to their gospel that "Life can never be too disorienting" (SIA 13).
Comparing the situationist ethos of detourned titles with the stan-
dard compositionist line on the function of titles is illuminating.
Operating from an aesthetics of parody, situationists chose titles
for the "inevitable counteraction" they could evoke when linked
with other texts (visual or verbal): "Thus one can make extensive
use of specific titles taken from scientific publications ('Coastal
Biology of Temperate Seas') or military ones ('Night Combat of
Small Infantry Units'), or even of many phrases found in illustrated
children's books ('Marvelous Landscapes Greet the Voyagers')"
(SIA 13). Guiding their impulse was the conviction that "pure,
absolute expression is dead; it only survives in parodic form. . .
Detournement is less effective the more it approaches a rational
reply" (SIA 10). Bread-alone compositionists are unfailingly rational,
about titles as well as everything else: "Just trying to select a title
will help you focus for if you discover that the only title you can think
of is vague and extremely broad, you will be forced to realize either
that the paper you plan is far too ambitious or that you haven't done
enough preliminary work to clarify in your own mind just what it is
you want to do" (Hairston 25). A pedagogy geared toward clarifica-
tion rather than disorientation will never yield the sublime. To build
a pedagogy on such a limited notion of titles dooms your curric-
ulum
(as well as the writing done within it) right from the start; it's not so
much the banking as the bankrupt concept of education. Rather
than even parodies of writing, then--let alone the full-blown pos-
sibilities of allegories--students are offered flat fictions: Horatio
Alger narratives in which the moral is that if they just follow the
neatly
ordered, representational program, they'll make it (to the authentic,
the academic, the counter-hegemonic, etc.). Our (uni)formalist
architecture, then, only offers students the option to (re)repro-
duce a
grand, old (huge gray) monument, one much like Donato's
Museum,
held together by a similarly noble, air-tight fiction about privileged
commodities, which, if disappeared, creates nothing but a heap
of rubble:

The set of objects the Museum displays is sustained only by the
fiction that they somehow constitute a coherent representational
universe. The fiction is that a repeated metonymic displacement
of fragment for totality, object to label, series of objects to series
of labels, can still produce a representation which is somehow
adequate to a nonlinguistic universe. Such a fiction is the result
of an uncritical belief in the notion that ordering and classifying,
that is to say, the spatial juxtaposition of fragments, can produce
a representational understanding of the world. Should the fiction
disappear, there is nothing left of the Museum but "bric-a-brac,"
a heap of meaningless and valueless fragments of objects which
are incapable of substituting themselves either metonymically
for the original objects or metaphorically for their representa-
tions. (223)

That our curriculum in underscored by the Museum's fiction of
representation is seen in Bloom's primal scene for composition:
"Imagine such a young person walking through the Louvre or
the Uffizi, and you can immediately grasp the condition of his
soul. . . . [T]hese artists counted on immediate recognition of
their subjects . . . on their having a powerful meaning for their
viewers" (63). Judging writing according to the metonymic rather
than the allegorical skews our vision of what students are actually
doing. In a parodic curriculum, we can see the student as Claes
Oldenburg, that classic monument-parodist, who began to dis-
trust the smothering space of the Museum, and so took his work
outside, into the public space of urbanity, or rather into urbanity's
sublime: Ashton reads Oldenburg as building his "mocker[ies]"
of monuments in "spaces grandly imagined to be beyond the
realm of possibility" (12). Our students, though, know the penalty
for daring to leave the Museum. The Cashinahuan Coyote-writer,
White Shoes, is nailed as the least successful writer because he
locates himself outside of history and the legitimate work of the
discourse, relying on appropriation of commonplace materials for
his effect (Bartholomae, "Inventing" 150-155). Indeed, he reduces
that great onus of history and discourse to a cheap little parody of
a Hollywood bio-pic, replacing the spectacular subject with himself;
Bartholomae sniffs at such naive nerve (or oblivious ignorance)
while he puts on the cuffs, shaking his head at White Shoes'
attempt to turn a half-assed "act of appropriation [into] a narrative
of courage and conquest" (151). But seen allegorically, White
Shoes' strategies make sense: "Allegorical imagery is appropri-
ated imagery; the allegorist does not invent images but confiscates
them" (Owens 205). Inventing the university seems unnecessarily
hard and ultimately tedious (unless inventing a wholly new and
different one, not of the classical or your everyday model); confis-
cating the university is far more intriguing--of course, as the situa-
tionist graffiti-slogan suggests, there always remains "ABOLISH-
[ING] THE UNIVERSITY" (SIA 344).

        So, no, I don't think we spend too much time planning
dwellable, exciting spaces to inhabit in our curriculum. (Lutz:
"The classroom as presently structured does not provide the
environment in which anything creative can be taught" 35.) Not
only do we not offer students textual structures they "cannot help
but love" (Chtcheglov), but the notion of students possibly loving
our textual worlds "to the point of death" (Bataille) is too depressing
to contemplate. Never even considering the possibility of allegory,
we only offer composition as a cruel representational fiction of "real-
world" writing, affirming a one-to-one correspondence between
our writing assignments and students' resultant preparedness to
get great jobs and make a lot of money (again, bread alone). But
wait--just what goes on in those beautiful urban high-rises for
which we target our students, anyway? Do they have any secrets
they want to hide? That is, are there any cracks in the beautifully
smooth surface (of authenticity and/or power) our real-world archae-
ologists of language and authority trace--cracks, maybe, that are
big enough to fall into, which form a labyrinth in which notions of
positioning are rendered meaningless? I'd like to offer a few more
examples of electronic discourse, these from an anonymous
technical writer in a large computer corporation (corporate and
personal names changed). Here's her de'rive through the psycho-
geography of the crushingly real world, in the form of excerpts from
the e-mail messages she steals time away from work to write to an
old friend at her former firm:

David also told me that he was glad I got OUT of Dynastar--that
Angela's reputation is very poor (the books are considered to be
technically deficient) and that's based on ABC's dealings with her
and complaints about the technical inaccuracy of the books. They
think she's a fool. (Naturally the books are inaccurate, nobody
knows the system and people like Suzanne are working on
books!)

Hi. Don't have a lot of time this am, but wanted to caution you on
what and to whom you are giving away stuff to (how do you like
that syntax?). Do NOT "give" Theresa's group anything--make
sure you have yourself covered contractually so that she/they
can't appropriate it, and believe me, that's not unknown. (Get a
lawyer to draft it). Don't give Tom a preview copy of anything, either.
It could have a way of getting duplicated. I know he's a friend of
yours, but you have to protect the "product". You simply would
not have legal leg 1 to stand on if you don't get a non-disclosure
ahead of time.

Rita Davis looked like hell when I saw her. However, she was
drugged out and depressed. I was so sorry to see her that way.

Speaking of work! I'm up to my ears in it. I'm going to make my
deadline--dead or alive, and I'm already down to 114 lbs (via the
electronic mail scale in the delivery area). The ONLY good thing
about my project is that it's giving me tremendous VISIBILITY
throughout the plant.

I'm looking for another company. I'm tired of Centron. Although
this is a lot better than Dynastar, it's become ever-increasingly
obvious to me that Centron doesn't give a shit about documen-
tation--no matter what they say. It's still on the bottom of the pile,
according to industry listings.

More than 1/3 of the group are talking transfer, but most of the
people here have families to support (several women who are
heads of the household, etc) and I don't really know what's going
to happen. I do know that it's become REAL obvious that there
was a mistake made . . . and a BIG one.

That woman is THE most political bitch I ever met. I have taken
more courses than ANYONE else in this group on our product
and other writers COME TO ME for information now!!! as well as
to 'lift' sections from my book!!! Yet she had the balls to tell me
that I wasn't a good fit!

One of the few replies her friend makes in the course of the trans-
cript of thirty-some pages of messages is "Take care of yourself,
and don't lose any more weight. You'll be looking like a bone with
hair, like before." It's almost unbearably touching, this corporate
writer's blind business savviness: the more she shrinks, body
wasting away to the near-invisibility of bone and hair (like before)
from job-induced stress, the more she believes, "it's giving me
tremendous VISIBILITY throughout the plant." But surely we're
not surprised at this. We know how many people hate living in
the chokehold of our contemporary economy. Yet curricularly
we keep up the mythology that recycling the standard form of
academic writing somehow constitutes individual empowerment;
that accommodation to that reality can allow students to position
themselves comfortably (or more critically) (or, finally, more
firmly?) in that chokehold; that it can, for example, wipe out
the racial and gender realities of corporate glass ceilings. Even
if it could, what about, you know, the ozone layer, or AIDS?
Roger, for example, an African-American convinced AIDS is a
government-sponsored plot aimed in large part at his race,
mentions AIDS frequently in his LANtalk (e.g., "How is A.I.D.S.
going to pop up in AFRICA from monkey shit and there has
been monkeys there for millions of years. please please tell
me"), which is more than I can say for academic writing or its
sponsors. Despite Bartholomae's conviction that "to teach late-
adolescents that writing is an expression of individual thoughts
and feelings . . . makes them suckers and . . . makes them power-
less, at least to the degree that it makes them blind to tradition,
power and authority as they are present in language and culture"
("Reply" 128-129), teaching them the rules of academic and pro-
fessional writing equally suckers, equally disempowers: it leads
students to believe there is a way out of the labyrinth, it suckers
them "that successful readers and writers [can] actively seek out
the margins and aggressively poise themselves in a hesitant and
tenuous relationship to the language and methods of the uni-
versity" (Facts 41, emphasis mine). Such a pedagogy becomes
Icarian complex: "One of the labyrinth's most subtle (treacherous)
detours leads one to believe it is possible to get out, even making
one desire to do so. Sublimation is a false exit that is an integral
part of its economy" (Hollier 73).

        The situationists make it clear that a curriculum driven
by the needs of industry is in no way empowering: "The require-
ments of modern capitalism determine that most students will
become mere lower cadres (that is to say, with a function equi-
valent to that filled by the skilled worker in the nineteenth century)"
(SIA 320-321power and the political are only too apparent. 
Bataille has no
doubt where ultimate blame lies, in the hands of those who
serve to prop up the techniques and politics of utility:

It has seemed to me that in the end the servility of thought, its
submissiveness to useful ends, in a word its abdication, is infini-
tely dreadful. Indeed present day political and technical thought,
which is reaching a kind of hypertrophy, has gotten us ludicrous
results in the very sphere of useful ends. Nothing must be con-
cealed: what is involved, finally, is a failure of humanity. True, this
failure does not concern humanity as a whole. Only SERVILE
MAN, who averts his eyes from that which is not useful, which
serves no purpose, is implicated. (Vols. 2 and 3, 14-15)

All a curriculum designed to reproduce uniformity in writing em-
powers is the system academic writing serves (no matter how
counter-hegemonic its ideology, there remain those "reformist-
progressive social and industrial aims that it could seldom achieve
in reality"). Why conceal it? Why hide the tragedy, covering it up
with another dull monument? Nothing must be concealed: let's
exhume some bodies, then. For example, if some significant
part of what our writers in the "real world" are going to be writing
is what this corporate writer writes to her friend (this shadowy
writing which our profession so rarely mentions), why not reveal
it, even (especially) teach to it? Why not allow the irrational needs
of industry to inform our curriculum? Future business people,
for example, might profit by becoming more attentive to e-mail
gossip, how to read it, how that writing fits in our culture, whence
it arises, and how it represents reality (indeed, the very reality it
chooses to represent). It might give students a better sense of
control over their futures, show them a side of their future pro-
fession that the textbooks don't, show them that the spectacular
(say, Dynasty) just might be a more instructive text for the way
business writing actually works than the professional. It might
even allow for a discussion of ethics. In fact, we could argue that
this discourse is the primal scene of professional writing, the
everyday of technical writing, its parking lot or stairwell, writing
under the sign of The Art of the Deal rather than The Elements
of Style. Besides, aren't such e-mail messages and gossipy
memos the key contemporary documents where policy is really
made, rather than the later formalized texts in which policy is ritually
presented or even obfuscated? If a curriculum of expressive
writing makes our students "suckers" and keeps them unem-
powered, how crucial a piece of the empowerment puzzle is this
kind of discourse to combating suckerdom? Would this LANwriter--
who, her messages reveal, graduated from a university with one
of the best-known technical writing programs in the country--have
perhaps made a better decision about her life and her profession
if she had seen samples of this kind of writing as an undergraduate,
showing how alienating this labor would be? Does she, I wonder,
feel like a sucker for getting into this field?

        But even a critique like this keeps the discussion
grounded too much in the mythology of the political. The need
to bring in such texts as that e-mail writing above is most impor-
tantly to show the loss, the sacrifice, the waste that our curriculum,
like our culture, denies. Composition's sculptural conceals its
sepulchral; those actively heroic Greek temples we teach to are
really tombs, masking the dead, disguising the sacrificial victim
of the academic order of unified discourse: "Johnny's carefully
prepared dead body of a theme, cleaned of all the dirt of the
street" (Macrorie 7). Our concerns for efficiency, versatility, and
success align us with the Inca civilization--in Bataille's view, "the
most administrative and orderly ever formed by men" (Hollier 48).
Their urban program of monumental uniformity without ornamen-
tation sounds very Modern, very much the huge gray result of
university writing:

Cuzco, the capital of the Inca empire, was situated on a high
plateau at the foot of a sort of fortified acropolis. A massive, pon-
derous grandeur characterized this city. Tall houses built of huge
stone blocks, with no outside windows, no ornament, and
thatched roofs, made the streets seem somewhat sordid and
sad. The temples overlooking the roofs were of an equally stark
architecture. . . . Nothing managed to dispel the impression of
mediocre brutality, and above all of stupefying uniformity.
(Hollier 48)

A small plea then: instead of our current Inca-style academic archi-
tecture (the Incas, whose temples disguised their human sacrifices,
victims being strangled far inside), perhaps we can at least turn to
an Aztec model. The Aztecs, Bataille tells us, were a civilization of
total consumption, concerned only with sacrifice: "all their impor-
tant undertakings were useless" (Vol. 1 46). And so, their archi-
tecture culminated in their pyramids, at the top of which their victims
were sacrificed, out in the open, not denied deep inside. "For
Bataille the world of the Aztecs will remain the model of a society
that does not repress the sacrifice that forms it" (Hollier 47). Our
profession may mask the loss and sacrifice on which its verbal
monuments are built, but deep within the labyrinth of our "real
world" curriculum is the corporate writer above, slowly being
strangled by that chokehold our discursive order reproduces
(even as it represses it), wasting away, getting thinner and thinner,
until, as her friend fears, there will be nothing left but bone and hair.

        We could, of course, simply junk the whole notion of power
and the political. Contemporary theorists who can precisely chart
power's minutest pervasions through discourse and culture begin
to sound suspicious; that word rolls too easily off the lips of express-
ivist and cultural critic alike. They offer not an archaeology of power,
but a mythology, which ultimately acts to keep the myth of power
alive. As Baudrillard says in his critique of Foucault, "The very per-
fection of this analytical chronicle of power is disturbing. Something
tells us--but implicitly, as if seen in a reverse shot of this writing too
beautiful to be true--that if it is possible at last to talk with such defini-
tive understanding about power . . . even down to [its] most delicate
metamorphoses, it is because at some point all this is here and now
over with" (11). There is no power, there are just the masses (and
guns and money and monuments, of course). I ask the political
theorists, who seem expert in power's machinations, why they don't
effectively operationalize their knowledge beyond the curriculum;
I ask them the questions Helen Caldicott asks her lecture audience:
Why aren't you storming the White House walls? How many of you
are willing to give up your lives to work for your politics? What would
Christ have done? Christ, now there was a theorist with an ethic
of the divine, a gospel of the sublime: a theorist of "by bread alone
. . . Not!" Perhaps it's time for the archaeologists of power and
counter-discourse to devise a significant practice for the gospel
they speak so beautifully in classrooms and convention halls;
they might learn from the cultural studies' scholars of AIDS who
have become full-time activists. What would empower students
more--teaching them how to accommodate to the rules of aca-
demic discourse; or teaching them that if they organized they could
demand that they be allowed to write any way they wanted, that they
would not have to waste so much time learning to speak like us (their
own language being almost all right)? What if they gave a war and
nobody came? What if they had an academic discourse and nobody
used it? This is the kind of thing the arche'-texts of composition
never seem to cover in their chapters on "Getting Organized."

END OF PART 4 OF SIRC'S ARTICLE
======================================
Date:         Thu, 10 Nov 1994 11:52:56 -0500 
From:         "Victor J. Vitanza" 
Subject:      REINV: Sirc, part 5

********

PART 5 OF SIRC'S ARTICLE


        Besides, ridding our curricula of the mythology of power
would leave us more time to think about fun. Theorizing a new
urbanism means positioning one of the city's most glorious mo-
ments, the carnival, into the new program. And I think that is ulti-
mately what electronic discourse, by capturing students' pas-
sionate de'rives, does to a classroom: it carnivalizes it. In the class-
room-as-carnival, the celebrants dress in the drag of authority not
to reproduce it but to mock it, which for Barthes is the very defini-
tion of text: "The text is (should be) that uninhibited person who
shows his behind to the Political Father" (53). Carnival is the time
when a city comes most wildly, excitedly alive. In LANtalk, students
costume themselves (either in exaggerated, institutional false
faces or just joyous, smiley faces) and, amid lots of laughter,
overturn official culture; by doing so, they unmask it, revealing the
skeletons in its tomb-like closets. Bakhtin noted what amounts
to the carnival's allegorical function as palimpsest of the everyday,
in the way it affirms the life of the common people outside of the
authority of politics and religion, "a second world and a second
life outside officialdom" (6). Since that authoritarian narrative was
characterized by "asceticism" and "oppression" (73), this second
story becomes the sublime, the beyond-bread. My students
continue this tradition; their verbal caricatures of Allan Bloom are
as much carnival grotesques as the pompous, overbearing,
ultimately laughable demon of The Closing of the American Mind.
Charlie, for example, kept referring to Bloom in his LANtalk and
solo prose as "Plume," which I found very witty, catching the ana-
chronistic nature of his subject. His "ITS because he was raised in
the attic of a cheese factory" is not academic analysis, it's more like
bathroom graffiti; but as pithy, zen analysis, it's also like the clever
(and resonant) identity-texts people write on stadium banners at
the game-as-festival. (Sara Kiesler, on e-mail in the corporate
sector: "It's like all of a sudden there is this park in the middle of
my company, and the park is open and there are no hours posted,
so anybody can go into the park and cavort" Bair D1.) The colloquia
of carnival opposes itself to the authoritarian word, not accidently
so but purposively so. But this means that there can be no ques-
tion of the negotiation or reconciliation between LANtalk and aca-
demic discourse; there will always remain this simple opposition:
LANtalk as glitzy funhouse in the arid Mojave of university writing.
As such, then, it resembles nothing so much as Las Vegas. And
Venturi reminds us that there's another name for scenes like Las
Vegas, oases of fun and enjoyment in the midst of a harsh climate:
pleasure zones. He taxonomizes their architecture around points
that would seem to trace a sweet geometry for the writing class:

For the architect or urban designer, comparisons of Las Vegas
with others of the world's "pleasure zones"--with Marienbad, the
Alhambra, Xanadu, and Disneyland, for instance--suggest that
essential to the imagery of pleasure-zone architecture are light-
ness, the quality of being an oasis in a perhaps hostile climate,
heightened symbolism, and the ability to engulf the visitor in a
new role. (LLV 53)

But we don't follow that logic in our curricular designs (outside
of the accidental occurrence of situationist Strip-talk). Our archi-
tecture is heavy, with the weight of discursive tradition; the climate
never turns oasis-like, but stays seriously harsh, either from peda-
gogies of oppression or psychological self-realization; our sym-
bolic is bland with "real-world" representative mimicry; and the role-
playing is limited, confined either to shabby suits of social realism
or costumes left over from an old TV sitcom. We give students an
amusement park, though, to be sure, in the sense of the removal
of our curriculum from the real, but it's not very much fun; who could
enjoy Stewart's Gulliver-o-Rama in Champaign-Urbana or Barthol-
omae's Discourse-Pirates of the Freirean? Baudrillard noted that
the third phase of simulation, in its gradual envelopment of the real,
is how "it masks the absence of a basic reality" (Simulations 11), and
I guess that's what we have, a kind of third-order (third-rate?) Disney-
land--Euro(Centric)Disney, then, with Allan Bloom in mouse ears
("Are we perfecting our souls yet?"). Foucault: "Finally, the student
is given a gamelike way of life; he is offered a kind of distraction,
amusement, freedom which, again, has nothing to do with real life;
it is this kind of artificial, theatrical society, a society of cardboard,
that is being built around him"  (65). If we want to be innovative, rev-
olutionary curriculum designers, we might think more about the archi-
tectural tenets of pleasure zones when we delineate our "rules"
for writers, and we might remember that for the situationists, "Prole-
tarian revolutions will be festivals or nothing, for festivity is the very
keynote of the life they announce. Play is the ultimate principle of
this festival, and the only rules it can recognize are to live without
dead time and to enjoy without restraints" (SIA 337). It was not so
very long ago we watched another exhausted system overturned
by the Velvet Revolution, a name coined from its architects' enjoy-
ment of trashy pop junk like the Velvet Underground. (Donald, did
they speak of revolution in their own words, do you think, or in Lou
Reed's? And does it really matter, finally?) In any architecture,
systems have lives of their own that do not always follow their in-
tended programs. Baudrillard speculates that cities may be im-
ploding in on themselves because they are no longer responsive
to their populace; hence we have power distributed along multiple,
unpredictable points, seen by Baudrillard in the actions of Italian
students running pirate-radio stations, media-seizers whose actions-
-as architects of a critical-regionalist resistance to the increasing
universalization--remind meof some of my LANtalkers:

That is what continues underground: the implosion of social struc-
ture, institutions, power . . . . In Italy something of the same type is
in play. In the actions of students, Metropolitan Indians, radio-pirates,
something goes on which no longer partakes of the category of
universality, having nothing to do either with classical solidarity
(politics) or with the information diffusion of the media . . . . In order
that mechanisms of such universality cease functioning, something
must have changed; something must have taken place for the effect
of subversion to move in some sense in the inverse direction,
toward the interior, in defiance of the universal. Universality is sub-
verted by an action within a limited, circumscribed sphere, one that
is very concentrated, very dense, one that is exhausted by its own
revolution. Here we have an absolutely new process.

        Such indeed are the radio-pirates, no longer broadcasting
centers, but multiple points of implosion, points in an ungraspable
swarm. They are a shifting landmass, but a landmass nonetheless,
resistant to the homogeneity of political space. That is why the
system must reduce them. Not for their political or militant content,
but because, nonextensible, nonexplosive, nongeneralizable,
they are dangerous locations, drawing their uniqueness and their
peculiar violence from their refusal to be a system of expansion.
("Beaubourg-Effect," 13)

The immediacy of the new technology in writing classrooms, though,
means our students' rhizomatous reversibility becomes increasingly
harder to reduce, despite the efforts of composition's Media
Business Operatives to fit it into the political or self-developmental
lip-syncs they offer as the "real."

        The choice seems pretty clear as to what we are teaching
to, what use will ultimately be made of the compositions we erect
on the landscape. Basically, I see the choice as between the level
fields of parking lots and playgrounds, on the one hand, and the high,
phallic grandeur of institutional monuments (temples, palaces, office
towers, universities), hiding their deadly serious business, on the
other. To put it another way, we can allow students the seduction
of texts in a carnival classroom, or we can train them to create writing
that can be used in the production and marketing of bombs. But,
hey, wait a minute; aren't I wildly oversimplifying? Aren't there really
many other safe, neutral, professional capacities in which students
could honorably be working--in which they could even be critiquing
those systems of hegemony? Perhaps, but they're so few, they're
almost not worth mentioning. The use of our excess in the university
writing classroom, where the uniformity of the essayist tradition
reigns, perfectly mirrors that of our larger culture, in which

perhaps three-quarters or more of the federal income, over the years,
has been spent on "defense" or war-related matters or on servicing
the debt on money borrowed for war. . . . [D]uring the forty years of
the national security state, corporate America not only collected
most of the federal revenue for "defense" but, in the process, re-
duced its share of federal taxes by twenty percentage points. Was
this a conspiracy? No. They all think alike. Yes. They all think alike.
(Vidal 90)

They think alike, Vidal claims, because of the universalization of
the educational program, particularly for the ruling class, in the way
it will not admit complexity and contradiction: The education of the
ruling class "insures that everyone so educated will tend to think
alike. . . . [T]he indoctrination of the prep school alone is usually
quite enough to create uniformity of ruling-class opinion when it
comes to the rights of property. Since our corporate state is deeply
democratic, there are always jobs available to middle-class careerists
willing to play the game" (88). Whoever continues to speak of uni-
formity "today means destruction" (Kamper & Wulf 1). The basic
on-the-bus/off-the-bus choice of war or carnival shouldn't surprise;
it's as old as the hills. Architecture always boils down to a choice be-
tween "the Greek temple [and its] historical and archetypal opposite,
the urban facades of Italy, with their endless adjustments to the
counter-requirements of inside and outside and their inflection with
all the business of everyday life." Bataille reads the historical data for
his theory of general economy and finds two extremes in the way
excess resources were either "gloriously or catastrophically" con-
sumed: in war and/or human sacrifice (for which victims were often
prisoners of war) on the one hand, and the wasteful squandering of
potlach festivals, on the other. The two impulses are at odds: "in
general, sacrifice withdraws useful products from profane circulation;
in principle the gifts of potlach liberate objects that are useless from
the start" (Vol. 1 76). I'll take potlach, which represents true luxury,
true acquisition. The squandering of resources represented by
potlach is similar to what composition teachers from Bruffee to
Farris would consider the squandering of productive task-oriented
time in the writing classroom, but that's a superficial reading of
the situation, one determined by a pedagogy of poverty and the
oppressed:

It is not what is imagined by those who have reduced it to their
poverty; it is the return of life's immensity to the truth of exuberance.
This truth destroys those who have taken it for what it is not; the
least that one can say is that the present forms of wealth make a
shambles and a human mockery of those who think they own it.
In this respect, present-day society is a huge counterfeit, where
this truth of wealth has underhandedly slipped into extreme
poverty. The true luxury and the real potlach of our times falls
to the poverty-stricken, that is, to the individual who lies down
and scoffs. A genuine luxury requires the complete contempt
for riches, the somber indifference of the individual who refuses
work and makes his life on the one hand an infinitely ruined
splendor, and on the other, a silent insult to the laborious lie of
the rich. . . [N]o one can rediscover the meaning of wealth, the
explosiveness that it heralds, unless it is the splendor of rags and
the somber challenge of indifference. One might say, finally, that
the lie destines life's exuberance to revolt. (Vol. 1, 76-77)

So no more Versatile or Successful (or Servile) Writers, please;
rather Utterly Useless Aztec-Writers, Infinitely-Ruined Splendor-
Writers. No more Facts, Artifacts, and Counterfacts; rather Wishes,
Lies, and Dreams. Enough of Optimal Technologies already,
bring on some Nonstraightforward Technologies for a change.
Bataille's reading is confirmed in my LANtalk transcripts: the truly
rich, the linguistically exuberant, are often those our profession
would deem the textually poverty-stricken, the grammatically
homeless. And just what are the students supposed to be suc-
cessful professionspeakers or versatile writers for, anyway, if not
the festival, the glorious, the miraculous, the too-marvellous for
words? That's what everyone works for: not bread alone, but
luxury, enjoyment, taking it easy. Bataille: "the worker's wage
enables him to drink a glass of wine: he may do so, as he says, to
give him strength, but he really drinks in the hope of escaping
the necessity that is the principle of labor" (Vols. 2 & 3, 199).

        What is genetically encoded in our curriculum is neither
power nor authenticity, but simply the indifference of those
affected by it, and its ultimate explosion into exuberance. Or rather,
implosion, since that's what condemned buildings do: the lie
destines life's exuberance to revolt. The lie goes by the name
"success," and the scam we work, if students will just enter into
our temples as true believers (sacrificial victims?), is "successful
writing." Canetti speaks of "the writer's profession" in terms that
show both the irrelevance of "success" in our classrooms as
well as how blithely we discount our most sublime resources
in its name:

If I now totally ignore what passes for success, if I even distrust
it, then I do so because of a danger that everyone knows to
exist in himself. The striving for success and success itself have
a narrowing effect. The goal-oriented man on his way regards
most things not serving the goal as ballast. He throws them out
in order to be lighter, it cannot concern him that they are
perhaps his best things (243).

Bartholomae himself proves the truth of Canetti's sad prophecy.
Boasting of his professional remove from all the give-and-take
business of everyday life, he stiffly affirms his role as architect
of Greek Temples, not urban Italian facades:

There are parts of my life where I make friends, talk about kids
and food and sports (this is my brand of common sense) and
take it easy. I try not to write from it, however, or to confuse
my professional work with the give and take of common life.
("Reply" 130)

As such, he denies the miraculous possibilities of allegory:
for him, any person, any object, any relationship cannot mean
anything else. The everyday cannot substitute for the profes-
sional: talk about the kids cannot count as composition theory,
just as Stephen North's Jimmy Stewart impression cannot, for
Bartholomae, count as a conference presentation. The flip side
of Bartholomae's aloof reserve is Foucault's urban-Italian claim
that what is "academic" is "traditional in nature, obsolete . . . and
not directly tied to the needs and problems of today" (65). And
anyway, I think, say, "talk about kids" can substitute quite well for
composition theory. I think, for example, that Mister Rogers offers
more sublime composition theory than any "professional" compo-
sitionist could ever hope to. What could you possibly hope to
build a better composition class on than theory like this:

As a minister, Rogers has never thought of his television program,
or Studio A, or any part of the world as a place to preach. "I never
wanted to superimpose anything on anybody," he says. "I would
like to think that I can create some sort of atmosphere that allows
people to be comfortable enough to be who they are. And conse-
quently, if they are, they can grow from there.

"A lot of this--all of this--is just tending soil." (Laskas 82)

What discursive tradition or authentic voice could ever tell you
anything more sublime about how to design a psychogeograph-
ical space in which people can reflect on writing? This is bedrock,
Lefebvrian shape-of-fields theory, anything else is just too
"deep." Compositionists themselves should be read allegorically.
When all allegorical readings are permitted, when we can palimp-
sestically trace the runes of the expressivist ("You have the choice
of thinking like a student or like a writer") in the facade of the anti-
expressivist ("At an advanced stage, I would place students who
establish their authority as writers" "Inventing" 158), then we can
see what little difference there really is between them as com-
pared to a situationist like Fred Rogers. Venturi's list of compar-
ative features charting the differences between the Urban Sprawl
("formally . . . an awful mess; symbolically . . . a rich mix" LLV 117)
and the Megastructure ("a distortion of normal city building pro-
cess for the sake inter alia of image" LLV 119) provides a handy
checklist to distinguish a situationist rhetoric from the dry Modern-
ism of bread-alone's simulation:

Urban Sprawl                            		Megastructure

Ugly and ordinary                       		Heroic and original

Big signs designed by commercial        	Little signs (and only if
artists                                 			absolutely necessary)
                                        			designed
                                                			by "graphic artists"

Auto environment                        		Post- and pre-auto envir-
                                        			onment

Takes the parking lot seriously and     	"Straight" architecture with
pastiches the pedestrian                		serious but egocentric aims
                                        			for the pedestrian; it irre-
                                        			sponsibly ignores or tries
                                       			 to "piazzafy" the parking lot

Promoted by sales staff         		Promoted by experts

Feasible and being built                		Technologically feasible
                                        			perhaps, but socially and
                                        			economically unfeasible

Popular life-style                      		"Correct" life-style

Process city                            		Instant city

Looks awful                             		Makes a nice model

Architects don't like                   		Architects like

Expedience                              		Technological indulgence

Vital mess                              			"Total Design" (and design
                                               			 review boards)

Building for markets                    		Building for Man

This year's problems                    		The old architectural revo-
                                       			 lution

Heterogeneous images            		The image of the middle-
                                        			class intelligentsia

The difficult whole                     		The easy whole
                                       	

 (adapted from LLV 118)


The Total Design theories of Megastructural architects, in reaction
to the seeming mess of the urban sprawl, become a misconceived
effort to supply the "real" as reality teems around them. They create
more impressive models than actual lived spaces: megastructures
"are a bore as architectural theory and ultimately, as well as immedi-
ately, unresponsive to the real and interesting problems now"
(LLV 149). Indeed, the sprawl of the Strip is in keeping with the
foundation of "process" upon which we've presumably erected
our new, humane composition, but "Modern architects . . . do not
recognize the image of the process city when they see it on the
Strip, because it is both too familiar and too different from what
they have been trained to accept" (LLV 119).

        If only composition could forget the "real world" that circum-
scribes it. It is so busy teaching to oppression or the dominant ideo-
logy (which students know only too well, from Day One), and avoid-
ing any mention of the sublime, that even if our students do reach a
position of power and control and make as much bread as they
want, they'll arrive there narrowed, ethic-less, unfestive, all dressed
up with nowhere to go. What composition calls "real" is always in
quotation marks, always simulation. The expressivist/academic
camps are subsumed by the rhetoric of simulation; their theory
makes it sound like language and identity are simply commodity,
pret-a-porter, a set of Mousketeer ears students take on and off at
will. Stewart: "Try the new attitude [of writer]. Like a pair of stiff new
shoes, it will seem awkward and uncomfortable at first, but you will
find it fitting more comfortably with each passing week" (19); Barth-
olomae: "The student has to learn to speak our language, to speak
as we do, to try on the peculiar ways of knowing, selecting, eval-
uating, reporting, concluding, and arguing that define the discourse
of our community" ("Inventing" 134). What they're trying on, really,
is irremovable, the straight jackets of formalist grammar and essayist
prose, the grammar of the monument that will crush them and bury
them. I'm no longer interested in giving them things to try on; I'm
more interested now in what they leave behind in the fitting rooms,
"the immense human wealth that the humblest facts of everyday
ife contain" (Lefebvre 132). What I see there is a language and
identity that is sweet, intelligent, joyous, exciting, available to all,
and almost all right, but soon flushed down the abatoir's sewer, as
the pure, clean forms of academic writing rush in to cover up the
dirty secret of waste at the heart of our discipline. (Irmscher: "In
many colleges and universities, Freshman English still serves its
traditional role: to get rid of the ill-prepared, not to help them be-
come better writers" 81.) I'm interested now in the real outside of
quotation marks. I don't need Marianna Torgovnick to tell me aca-
demic writing is not "exhilirating" (27); I can witness the guillotine-
rhythm of Bartholomae's gerunds--knowing, selecting, evaluating,
reporting, concluding, and arguing--everyday in the academy. All I
can do now is refuse to cover up the guillotine's work with another
beautiful monument, the way the Palais du Louvre was turned into
a lovely Museum after the Terror.

        And I can put forward my urban renewal project, built on
our basic need for non-sense and the nonstraightforward. My
project, a polite refusal to be a system of expansion, is offered in
the hopes of getting students to be richer writers by seeing a more
complex program, by learning more about the textures of their
most commonplace materials (there are interesting passages in
Venturi's books where he reveals his delight, over and over, in
having a tight budget to work within because it means using the
cheapest, most readily available materials), and by using those
materials (and others, of course) to become their own architects
of their own aesthetics: building compositions which are more
than just picturesque, more than just banal; which may have no
enclosure and little direction, but which move in interesting, ex-
citing ways over vast, expansive textures, and which recover an
abandoned tradition of rich iconology. But finally, my urbanism is
not a call for a new architecture (no more paradigm shifts, please;
Venturi cites Wallace Stevens as to how "incessant new begin-
nings lead to sterility" LLV 87); it's rather an anti-architecture, an
anti-aesthetic. I want to pressure the cracks in order to bring down
the monuments, which "oppos[e] the logic and majesty of authority
against all disturbing elements: it is in the form of cathedral or palace
that Church or State speaks to the multitudes and imposes silence
upon them" (Bataille, in Hollier 47). Quite often the only technique
that makes sense is a technique of critical demolition. Mine is an
"architecture-against-itself" to use the term with which Betrand
Tschumi labeled his project to turn the old La Villette slaughter-
house into a public park, described by Hollier in terms of the festive
and nonsensical that was the park's intent:

As if a donjuanesque architecture would escape finally from the
stiff, punitive order of the Commendatore. It would enter into games
and begin to dance. "The program can challenge the very ideology it
implied." Such a project calls upon the loss of meaning, to give it a
dionysiac dimension . . . the park, a postmodern "assault on mean-
ing," claims as its main purpose to "dismantle meaning." (xi)

Hollier, though, remained skeptical of Tschumi's plan to pave over
the slaughterhouse and erect a park devoted to science and in-
dustry, a park that would monumentally attempt to disguise the
slaughterhouse that was still there, of course (the persistence of
memory), in the form of the slaughtered waste of workers' lives repre-
sented by the very notion of "industry" the park intended to cele-
brate. My architectonics of composition, though--representing the
scene of the contemporary writing classroom not as temple or for-
tress (Bloom, Bartholomae), nor as office complex (Hairston's pluto-
graphy of composition), but simply as baseline firmament, as parking
lot--insists on the loss and denies the monument. Life, the every-
day, is doubled by death and loss, and allegory is the textual stra-
tegy that allows us to speak of the one story written over the other
(the urban facades of Italy and the ruins of the urban facades of Italy;
the skull beneath the skin); Benjamin: "For an appreciation of the
transcience of things, and the concern to rescue them for eternity,
is one of the strongest impulses in allegory" (223). Benjamin's pri-
mal scene of allegory is a perfect one to use for reading our stu-
dents' coursework: the trauerspiel. I want to raze the Inca monu-
ments, then; pave them over and erect NOTHING: parking-lot-as-
park, with just an allegorical plaque off to one side, commemo-
rating the waste and sacrifice of those who went before (who are
still going--alas, poor James, poor White Shoes, poor Harold, I
knew them . . .), a plaque that will tell always of the blood and bone
and hair underneath (the sweet, silly ornamentation of those wild
rainbows of dyed hair), so we never forget. I don't know, it seems
almost all right to me. I mean, this is America: our student-flaneurs
are into cars, even Donald Stewart knew that ("Don't tell me about
the various cars I have left out. You know them, probably to the
year, and relish that information" 6); so why ask them to leave their
rides behind and trek deep within our temples? Let's design our
curriculum around the needs of the auto environment. A curriculum-
made-festive can become a movable feast, a potlach tail-gating
party where all of us nomads can get out of our cars and just come
together to talk about ourselves and our language, sharing what
we know, maybe even enhancing the discourse already there in
us. "Out of the corner of my eye these days I sometimes see the
glimmer of a world transformed by millions of persons who expect
great things from each other" (Macrorie 187). And the party is held
out in the sun, not in the deep recesses of grandiloquent discur-
sive temples. Think of this as my de Chiricoesque "Arcade" period,
in which I feel empty spaces like parking lots can create a full-filled
time. "It is too late to be reasonable and educated--which has led to
a life without appeal. Secretly or not, it is necessary to become com-
pletely different, or to cease being" (Bataille, Visions 179). I urge
you to stop and smell the stucco roses in the parterre of the
asphalt landscape.


Endnote

        1. By LANtalk I mean the transcripts from student conver-
sations on a synchronous, local-area network using an interactive
dialogue program. For further discussion, see Sirc & Reynolds. In
all LANtalk excerpts I have preserved spelling and punctuation.


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