Modernity-as-Enlightenment . . . revolved around the
development of an explicit critical awareness of the
then-contemporary world as a source of practical
knowledge that could be accumulated and used to change
the world, to make it "better," rather than simply reinforce
and faithfully maintain the status quo. Its driving question
was . . . How can we use our understanding of the Contemporary
to build a better future?The prefixing of post typically arises in conjunction with periods
of restructuring and transition from one dominant form of modernity
to another . . . it connotes a competitive shift in hegemony and direction.Edward Soja
Postmodern Geographies and the Critique of Historicism
While recognizing the many and diverse theories concerning postmodernism and its definition, I would like to propose, for our purposes here, that postmodernism exists as a narrative directed toward the meaning of meaning and the means by which we chase truth through all of its various political, cultural, and thus historical genres. James Berlin, as a rhetorician, theorist, and postmodern philosopher has been on the hunt for some time and has come to some of his own conclusions regarding the postmodern moment and contemporary education. Especially relevant to teachers of English and Composition is his non-traditional rhetoric and the call for a pedagogical shift toward cultural studies in the English classroom. Thus, while giving a nod to all of his fellow postmodernists in general, I will concentrate on Berlin's social-epistemic rhetoric and its direct relation to the advent of cultural studies within the contemporary, i.e., postmodern, English department. In order to understand Berlin in terms of a postmodern tradition, we must first recognize what this term signifies and how it works for us in a move toward a liberatory pedagogy
Postmodernism: Building a Dialogic Tradition
As postmodern theorist Edward Soja claims, the term postmodern relates not so much to a deconstruction of tradition, as to a building upon residual historical significance; not so much to a paradigm shift as to an epistemological re-generation of our means to achieve the same sense of closure and security that previous models once allowed before becoming historically and culturally inefficient (115-117). Thus, the term "postmodern tradition" in my title is not so much an oxymoron as it is a call for a [re]viewing of the human tradition. The postmodern tradition is, essentially, dialogue. As Berlin would have it, dialogue is the basis of all knowing--it is the foundation of historically temporary traditions upon which all new traditions must be built. Rhetorically, the term, postmodern tradition, parallels Kenneth Burke's "logomachy" (19) the sense of language's fanciful war of meaning through dialectic based in our never-ending quest for closure that takes place with each utterance. Through Burke, we can see Berlin's own view of language as "the arena of struggle for determining the meaning of key signifiers . . . which operate in the formation and maintenance of economic and political conditions as well as the construction of social subjects" (Cultures 75). If we subscribe to J-F Lyotard's view that postmodernism is the product of our mistrust of enlightenment thought and industrialist hegemonies and Berlin's own observation that postmodernism effectively pre-empts Fordist industrial models of production and the negative standardization that mass production requires and maintains (Cultures 42-45), we can see it as a move away from the standard definition of tradition as well; however, our desire for closure and epistemological security compels us to retain a word like tradition as a sort of ontological touchstone. Yet, in order for the term to serve us well, we might see the ultimate tradition as the human will to knowledge through the questioning of our own being and the historic re-positioning of cultural and ideological values brought about through these questions. As Berlin would have it, it is through the tradition of recognizing and questioning our cultural codes and standards that true dynamic democracy can be achieved and maintained.
Berlin's rhetoric and his pedagogical model address dialogue and postmodernism in a three parts: move historical investigation, rhetorical repositioning, and a call for a move toward cultural studies in the contemporary English classroom. Succinctly, Berlin's developmental patterns unfold in this manner: 1) Historical investigation (Rhetoric and Reality) allows us to see the progressive movement of our discipline and its relation to the historical moment in which each progressive development occurs. It allows us to analyze the patterns of culturo-economic influence and the ratio of pedagogical application to the historical moment's production-related requirements. 2) Rhetorical repositioning, i.e., social-epistemic rhetoric, derives from historical investigation. Social-epistemicism allows us to both create and actively participate in a public forum relative to our own historical moment. It allows us to see language and community for what they are more so than what the traditional holders of truth (and here, I include social-constructionists) would lead us to believe it is. 3) Finally, Berlin's model for Cultural studies (Rhetorics, Poetics, and Cultures) comes from social-epistemicism. An exemplary example of Soja's social-political regeneration of modernity on a pedagogical level, the Cultural studies model transcends canonical tradition. Seeing all experience as text and all text as equally readable experience, Berlin's pedagogy combines a postmodern rhetoric with a nontraditional pedagogical move toward the study of our own signifying practices and their historical and cultural relevance to a student's active participation in a democratic situation that not only invites, but requires participation. Although cultural studies does not neglect canon, it does address non-canon text as equally important. The historical relevance of all text/experience allows a student to realize the codes of production and consumption that shaped the world from which traditional canonical texts emerged. Berlin's cultural studies demonstrates that all text is valid and in the process all writers are valid too.
Social Epistemicism: Rhetoric and Politic
The pivotal position in Berlin's tripartite movement is social-epistemic rhetoric, the means by which we might "language" our way into a diverse understanding of cultural dialogue and how we can make our world work for us by taking part in it. If we view the world of time (history), space (experience), and being (sociality) from a dialogic standpoint, power becomes a series of ever-dynamic questions rather than a set of static answers--the world becomes dialogic and Berlin's social-epistemic rhetoric rises to meet the challenge of a newly transactional society.
Berlin's key term key term here is simple yet profoundly postmodern: negotiation. A Marxian to the bone, Berlin views all experience as a readable text that unfolds within historical, economic, and relative ideological parameters girded in by historical patterns and hegemonic boundaries. In this sense, all rhetoric/language is "always already serving certain ideological claims" (Rhetoric and Ideology 477). Furthermore, he sees the experiencer as much a text as the experience, while the place where experience and experiencer meet is an equally complex, readable text. In effect, the writer/reader is a product of an environment that literally invites its own [re]production within a forum of dynamic transaction where, as Berlin says, ". . . the writing subject is a discursive construction, the subject serving as a point of conjuncture for a plethora of discourses . . ." (Culture 108). From a postmodern position, one must note the Bakhtinian dialogic flavor here as well as the Heideggerian sense of throwness wherein a subject must accommodate, assimilate, and re-create the always already world before her through language or remain "homeless" (Letter 242-43) in a community that requires an active voice of all its inhabitants. Hence, a construct of all that precedes her, the subject is always already influenced by the very stuff of her own discourse. Berlin sees clearly this idea of subject as ideologue, but he sees as well that the subject/ideology relationship is transactional. Though we are influenced by the always already, we yet have the privilege of choice. From this position, he observes that, "The subject is [thus] a construction of the play of discourses that a culture provides. These discourses interpellate or address us, providing each of us with directions about our behavior . . ." (Composition Studies 108). Because ideology always precedes us, we must remain "committed to teaching writing as an inescapably political act, the working out of contested cultural codes that affect every feature of our experience (Composition and Cultural 51). Social-epistemicism works from this premise. Writing and reading deal in the making of meaning based in contextual choices drawn from language and the always already human need for closure and order. Although there exits no reservoir of pre-set truth/meaning, the always already truth which precedes us continuously provides us with choices and influences from which we are compelled to re-create the meanings necessary to a responsible cultural dynamic. Or, as the postmodern compositionists shout: voice is not a privilege--it is a responsibility.
John Schilb has noted that Berlin's social-epistemic rhetoric is political because of its dialogic/dialectic nature and that, "for [Berlin] postmodern theory is worthwhile only if it [has] the dual focus the social-epistemicism implies." In short, Schilb observes, "Berlin loves his hyphen" (Between 104-105). The joining hyphen (rather than a seperatory slash) is important, and Schilb offers a valuable caveat: we need to value both sides of this theory and not allow epistemic a dominant role that offers to define social (104). Berlin realizes Schilb's concern when he discusses epistemic without the attached social in Rhetoric and Reality," observing that epistemic rhetoric per se is a form of expressivism; that, though "forming as well as expressing knowledge," epistemicism, alone, is "primarily involved in shaping private rather than social versions of knowledge, and [is] distinct from a rhetoric that serves non-epistemic functions.--in persuasive or expository writing for example (185).
Pure epistemicism has political implications beyond the personal when we consider the exclusivity of discourse communities and the danger of emergent situational ethics. Schilb uses Kenneth Bruffee's social constructionism as an example of how unchecked pragmatic rationalization allows meaning to be based in the way things ARE rather than calling for an exploration of why and how this specific set of truths exist. Without the ideological investigation unique to social-epistemicism, social construction fails to address "how domination and inequality structure people's lives" (Between 104-05). Berlin drives this point home in his essay, "Composition Studies and Cultural Studies," stating that social-epistemic rhetoric "considers signifying practices in relation to the ideological formation of the self within the context of economics, politics, and power" (109). Although not totally separate entities, pure social construction more or less identifies a pragmatic sort of truth, while social-epistemicism investigates the codes that prompt one into the desire to construct meaning/truth in the first place.
Because it calls for an ideological investigation of sorts, Berlin's rhetoric calls for a critical democracy, an active common voice. But, in order to partake in our own hegemony, we must all, first and foremost, become aware of the codes and boundaries by which we are defined--we must first become aware of hegemony. And this awareness requires dialogic competence and rhetorical and cultural literacy. Noting Paulo Freire's claim that language is a social construct always prior to individuals and that concrete and social experience both shape and limit us AND our language (Cultures 97-98), Berlin implies that Freirean empowerment comes of knowing the language of culture as well as the culture of language. He implies, as well, that this knowledge is not exclusive to stodgy academics and professional politicians. Social-epistemic rhetoric insists that this type of knowing is necessary to the general community if, for no other reason, than to protect us from stodgy academics and professional politicians. Accordingly, the best way to bring this knowing to the world is not through the (traditional) militaristic metaphor of breaking down the walls of binary opposition nor is it through the quasi-liberal metaphor of bridging the distance between oppositions. (Although bridges connect distance, they also maintain it.) Rather, social-epistemic knowing lies in the juncture, the actual joining of binary extremes into what Anne Ruggles Gere refers to as a "field," an area where complex forces join to create an energy beyond the power of conquered walls or tenuous bridges. Gere's field metaphor parallels Berlin's negotiation and social-epistemic rhetoric in her reference to the term as "a kind of charged space in which multiple sites of interaction appear" (4). The implied energy in this metaphor is quite evident--discourse is generated in the very friction of dialogic transaction, in the agonistics intrinsic to communication. Social-epistemicism allows for the electricity of transactive communication to effect both the writer and the world to which the writer offers to [re]invest what she has discovered in her own world experience. In this sense, it is not untoward to see both the writer and her culture as unique fields that share the same power source. They are one and they are apart. They are meaningless and they are meaningful simultaneously. And, most importantly, one cannot exist without the other. They are postmodern.
History and the Move Toward Cultural Maintenance: Putting the Social in Social-Epistemic
James Berlin's historical approach to Rhetoric and Composition studies provides a view into our discipline's origins and, in the process, a glimpse into where we are headed. Although some might see Berlin's historical groupings as a sort of stifling taxonomy of writing [(see Berlin's response to Schilb, College English, 51, 7 November, 1989 774)] the identification of pedagogical models throughout the history of college teaching, and especially in the generally new era of the college English department, allows us to hold a very dynamic and historically malleable epistemology still long enough to scrutinize and understand what it is we are doing and how we are trying to do it better. In his own case, Berlin projects the future of English studies onto a cultural grid that will allow students to understand democratic discourse and all of its various powers as a means to come to their own choices in a world that would otherwise control these choices. Yet, this power cannot come from a pure subjective individualism. Recognizing that so many students actually feel that they are "unified, coherent, sovereign selves," without realizing that they must maintain their individuality within the larger cultural context, Berlin sets up his model for English studies in one telling quote: "I don't want to make them believe that they can be individual; I just want them to understand that they are coded" (Transcript 10). The whole idea here is to bring to students the knowledge that all individuality "happens" within the vast historical-ideological realm into which they are thrown at birth; that the particular always emerges from the general. And, because language is profoundly cultural/dialogic, it is to our student's advantage that they become aware of the cultural codes that influence each of us, both consciously and sub-consciously, in all that we do and say. An awareness of the larger world of ideas will allow broader, more thoughtful decisions in the democratic critical interpretation of all text from experiential to literary.
Berlin's historical journey in Rhetoric and Reality (1987), ends with his discussion of epistemic rhetoric as a positive move toward a well rounded means to make meaning,; yet he sees the theory and practice of epistemic rhetoric as too subjective in that it "conceives composing in personal terms as the expression of an isolated self attempting to come to grips with an alien and recalcitrant world," a view that "denies the social nature of language and experience . . . rather than engaging [students] in public discourse to affect the social and political context of their behavior" (185). Not until a year after the publication of Rhetoric and Reality does Berlin publicly append the term social to epistemic to remedy the ideological shortcomings of what he sees as the two major rhetorical stances in the contemporary composition classroom: cognitive rhetoric and expressivism (Rhetoric and Ideology 488). Recognizing that all communication comes of ideology, he notes that cognitive rhetoric ignores ideology while expressivism transcends it. The former is overtly scientific and objective, while the latter is entirely too personal and subjective. To empower the maker of meaning ideologically as well as discursively, Berlin suggests social-epistemic rhetoric as an "alternative that is self consciously aware of its ideological stand, making the very question of ideology the center of classroom activities, and in so doing providing itself a defense against preemption and a strategy for self-criticism and self-correction" (478).
From this call for an ideological-awareness paired with a self-awareness juncture, or in Gere's terms, "field," we can fairly well see how Berlin's cultural studies model logically comes into play. Essentially, the social-epistemicist must see culture as text and thus text as a cultural artifact, a move that to many has an uncomfortable Marxian shift. But the Marxian tenet that we all make our own history, yet never exactly the history we would prefer, holds true. And, as Berlin notes in Kenneth Burke's words, "one does not have to accept the Marxian promise in order to realize the value of Marxian diagnosis" (Rhetoric and Ideology 492). The proletarian advantages of textual ownership transcend the utilitarian politics too many detractors of language theory resort to in order to own rather than share the forum. The real value of social-epistemic rhetoric and its relative model for cultural studies in composition lie in the fact that Berlin's postmodern dialogic rhetoric offers much to the student who will one day take an active role in the political forces unique to her own workaday real-world environment. Beyond the theory and the debate, one premise rings true--a clear, responsible voice will provide a window into the world.
Implications and Theory
Beyond the overtly political questions that social-epistemic theory raises, the rhetorical advantages of this type of instruction and guidance in English studies are profoundly positive. Simply put, social-epistemic rhetoric removes us from the current-traditionalist focus on "correct" writing and mechanical/grammatical applications and the neglect of personal/cultural voice (and we cannot fool ourselves into thinking that CTP is on the wane). It insists on a writer's ability to generate knowledge through writing process (epistemic) and a writer's skill in crafting a product designed to [re]insert successfully this knowledge back into the world (social). Relative to his sense of "transactive theories" (Rhetoric and Reality 15-19), Berlin's model redefines general Composition pedagogy by calling for neither a product nor a process orientation. Social-epistemicism calls for the equitable combination of all parts of the signifying experience, a politics of meaning that joins the traditionally opposed worlds of poetic and rhetoric, language and experience, I and Thou. In our recognition of traditionally pre-set boundaries and hegemonic codes we often discover the end product of any endeavor to be somehow lacking in either form or content--or both. from a less traditional position, we discover that all text, written or experiential, is always open to revision. Berlin's rhetorical model notes our right to revise in its call for a conscious dialogue between binaries, a recognition and understanding of other to the point of juncture so that both sides of the traditional binary slash are addressed and fulfilled. Tim Crusius echoes this same sentiment in his observation that totally process oriented rhetorical models neglect the fact that our students will be entering a product oriented world--that process must finally lead to a product and that further process will accrue from this sense of penultimate closure. In a statement that tacitly addresses Berlin's own views of the extremes of contemporary rhetorical models (cognitive/expressivism) Crusius observes that, "any product theory requires a complementary theory (emphasis mine) of process; conversely, it makes no sense to teach a writing process as if process were an end in itself, as if it were not what it is, a way to end . . ." (Discourse 115).
Berlin's political rhetoric addresses the postmodern move toward an active democratic paradigm that recognizes a ratio-based dialogue between all the parts of our signifying practices rather than the traditional either/or binarism still extant in formalist thought. Noting, in his final work, that contemporary education must be aimed toward a real-world discourse/dialogue, and that the English department is the most profound learning environment where this discourse can be discovered, he moves beyond his historian position into that of a postmodern theorist/philosopher. His constant return to the term "signifying practices" rather than the more traditional ways to talk about communication and his insistence on historicist protocols, allows him to transcend the stasis of traditional curricular models designed to reinforce institutional foundations rather than to question and challenge them. That the "historical moment" generates signifying practices--at all levels and in all genres--demonstrates the temporal nature of knowledge and truth rather than knowledge and truth's (static) position as a reference point for ideological standards. As language makes our world, Berlin observes that, "wherever signifying practices shape consciousness in daily life, cultural studies has work to do" (Cultures 169). And with cultural studies comes a cultural voice: social-epistemic rhetoric. The application of this voice fits into Berlin's postmodern insistence that our students learn the interpretive skills necessary to a rhetoric of critical inquiry so they might engage in the creation of new cultural narratives rather than the simple maintenance of static codes and institutions. In this sense, Berlin, as teacher and philosopher, calls for education to "catch up" with the technology it has spawned. As historicist, he offers us a positive means into the 21st century and the voice to maintain an ideological and political equilibrium. This is what James Berlin's rhetoric is all about.
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