Ethnographic writing as grassroots democratic action

Composition Studies, Spring 2003 by Kahn, Seth

Berlin details the theoretical process by which students discover, negotiate, and resist subject-positions in Rhetorics, Poetics, and Cultures. Drawing primarily on two prominent cultural studies theorists, Paul Smith and Stuart Hall, Berlin lays out a theory of rhetorical practice that (in his eyes) prepares students to take on the work of democratic citizenship in a post-Fordist society. Specifically, Berlin turns to the work of literary critic Paul Smith, whose Discerning the Subject contends that human agency emerges from the sometimes contrary interpellations to which we are subjected; for example, my agency as an academic is the product of contrary pulls between my theoretical/political orientation on the one hand and my institutional responsibilities on the other. Since neither the theoretical nor the institutional apparatuses fully interpellate me, I am in a position from which I have to negotiate their addresses. Whereas Smith turns to feminist theory to explain how subjects negotiate their positions, Berlin turns to Stuart Hall's "Encoding/Decoding" for Hall's elaboration of "accommodating," "negotiating," and "resisting" the messages encoded in texts. Hall argues that the various ways we consume texts are products of the various social formations in which we live and work. In other words, the subject-positions we take up in texts are formed by more than the texts themselves.

The writer in Berlin's formulation becomes a subject who negotiates her way through a maze of sometimes-conflicting semiotic codes by interpreting (reading and writing about) them. The subject also, by virtue of her negotiations among these codes, becomes an agent of resistance rather than a conduit for transparent, non-ideological languages. Writing and reading, so the story goes, become democratic actions:

For democracy to function (as we are now reminded in Eastern Europe), citizens must actively engage in public debate, applying reading and writing practices in the service of articulating their positions and their critiques of the positions of others. To have citizens who are unable to read and write for the public forum thus defeats the central purpose of the notion of democracy we have just examined: to ensure that all interests are heard before a communal decision is made. (Rhetoric 101)

Writing and reading are no longer school-subjects to be consumed; rather, they are by nature political acts at the heart of democratic life. The ultimate goal is to "enable students to become active, critical agents of their experience rather than passive victims of cultural codes" (104).

However much Berlin uses the terms writing and reading together (or under the rubric of interpretation), his reliance on Smith and Hall to develop a theory of political action reinforces the very politics of consumption he means to critique. In other words, neither Smith nor Hall offers any notion that writing (that is, production of text) leads to social change-instead, both Smith and Hall describe resistant reading practices and positions. Berlin's theoretical position suggests that our post-Fordist economic structure demands this kind of attention to consumption, but I would argue that he's lost the battle as soon as he makes consumption the centerpiece of his theoretical framework. I would also argue that his emphasis on consumption is a product of his own institutional agenda; for years, Berlin's work focused on ways to rethink relations between composition and literature, between rhetoric and poetic (see "Composition Studies and Cultural Studies"), between reading and writing, within English departments. Given the long history of political tensions between composition studies and literary studies, and the privileged position that literary studies enjoys, Berlin's agenda goes beyond his concern for the well-being of democracy. There appears to be something of a disjuncture between Berlin's practices and his political goals. Because his is a pedagogy of resistance, students might learn how not to be dominated, but nowhere do they learn to engage actively in changing structures of domination.