Monday, June 1, 2020
Wednesday, November 16, 2016
Occupy DC: Utopia: Red Ink: What the Movement Really Means and Where It Needs to Go
[IN MEDIA RES]
I suppose like many of us who complain about the present condition of things, I never could imagine an alternative to Late Capitalism. Sure, I've found my own way to forge a truce between me and late capitalist society, yet I've never felt great about it.
Since New York's Mayor Bloomberg's midnight raid on the OccupyWallStreet's Zuccotti Encampment, many have suggested that the movement decamp across the country. They say the encampments have become counter productive and that the time has come to develop a message.[1]
Such criticism that says the movement doesn't need physical space yet needs a positive[2] message, however, misses the movement's point. In fact, the movement's message, it seems to me, seems to not aim to impose a demand but to something quite radical to the American mind. It aims to simply point across the street to the international bank and say, "Not that." Living in such negative space seems to be the movement's genius.[3]
The Occupy movement seemingly has, of course, everyone talking and taking sides. Most of those on the political Right like Newt Gringrich naively dismiss the movement envisionin it as a return to their vision of the 60s Left. Indeed, recently Gingrich opined that "." Ultimately, he instructs those comprising the movement to "Go get a job after you take a bath." On the other hand, however, many on the Left, as Bill Clinton suggested at the Movement's inception, argue that the Occupiers need to develop a message, move into active space, become, philosophically speaking, positivists. Other positivist sympathizers, such as Salon's Todd Gitlin, in his "Liberty Park can be anywhere," suggest that the Occupiers "go home": " Others still warn against fetishizing a particular space.[3]
However, I find the Occupied Space still very important to the movement because it is a visual marker that movement still exists and that clean, well-organized space has become a visual counter to the "Get a shower / Get a job" crowd while serving as a gathering place for community and discussion. What is more, it has become a Utopian space that threatens those--like Gingrich and the rest of the 'Get a Job Crowd'--afraid of an Other, a status-quo apart from that in which they now live.
That the movement engenders such visceral, if predictable, reaction from the Right further proves to me precisely why the movement should reject such calls from the sympathetic Left to remove the tents and progress the movement in other ways. The tents--as Michael Bloomberg's raid suggests--have become an ecosystem apart from the world that surrounds it. And we need to hear Gingrich spout his non-sense again and again because it not only very much contrasts with the facts on the ground but also constantly reminds us of their own ignorance. For example, yelling "get a job" to those who can't jobs in the worst economy anyone alive has ever lived through and telling homeless people, which comprise up to 50 percent of fifty percent of the OccupyDC population, to get a shower positively shouts from the rooftops that the Right is still out of touch with events on the ground.
In fact, it's precisely that the Occupation forces such reactions that proves the movement's worth. It's mere presence, and its ability "grasp its critical negativitity" so disturbs those whom it scares it forces its critical opponents to live critical positivity. In other words, it forces those whom it scares to shout, "Get a job after you get a shower." In Jameson's words, the physical space allows the movement's non-message "to discredit and demystify the claims [. . .] of its opposite number [. . .] its function [therefore] lies not in itself, but in its capabilityt radically to negate its alternative" (175). In other words,
In fact, walking through the park as recently as November 12th presented the opportunity to sit and read in perfect peace; in other words, as I read on the bench, I found myself surrounded by community, a formal space which generated discussion and genuine human interaction. I had more conversation with strangers in the couple of hours I was at McPherson Square than I have the rest of the six months I have lived in DC.
In the Introduction to his tome on Utopia, Archaelogies of the Future: The Desire for Utopia and Other Science Fictions, Frederic Jameson debunks this claim that the left wants to tear down Capitalism. Jameson writes that in fact no one can even envision what a not-capitalist system would look like: "What is crippling is not the presence of an enemy but rather the universal belief, not only that this tendency [Late Capitlism] is irreversible, but that the historic alternatives to capitalism have been proven unviable and impossible, and the that no other socio-economic system is conceivable, let alone practically available" (xii). In other words, until Occupy (perhaps), Late Capitalism was inexorably dismanteling the modern social compact, and, the Left's political class was helping it along. I suggest, therefore, that Occupy's tents create a Utopian space realizes "a system radically different from this one" (Jameson xii). As Jameson notes, at least since Reagan, the nation's political elite (with the help of the media) has been
"tirelessly undoing all the social gains made since the inception of the soicalist and communist movements, repealing all the welfare measures, the safety net, the right to unionization, industrial and exological regulatory laws, offering to privatize pensions and indeed to dismantle whatever stands in the way of the free market all over the world" (xii). In fact, the so-called Tea Party's risible influence on the 2011 budget negotions has brought the destruction of the "social gains" not only to the forefront but as the only solution to the nation's economic problems.
After all, labeling a Democrat a "Socialist," not even having to use "Commmunist" has been the Republicans' favorite attack for years. By doing so, the American Right has cut anything less than the cutting of taxes as socialist attack. Therefore, Jameson suggests that
In other words, the news that the National Park Service may shut down the OccupationDC's encampment at McPherson Square should trouble us.
The following pictures hearten me; they show what's possible.
I suppose like many of us who complain about the present condition of things, I never could imagine an alternative to Late Capitalism. Sure, I've found my own way to forge a truce between me and late capitalist society, yet I've never felt great about it.
Since New York's Mayor Bloomberg's midnight raid on the OccupyWallStreet's Zuccotti Encampment, many have suggested that the movement decamp across the country. They say the encampments have become counter productive and that the time has come to develop a message.[1]
Such criticism that says the movement doesn't need physical space yet needs a positive[2] message, however, misses the movement's point. In fact, the movement's message, it seems to me, seems to not aim to impose a demand but to something quite radical to the American mind. It aims to simply point across the street to the international bank and say, "Not that." Living in such negative space seems to be the movement's genius.[3]
The Occupy movement seemingly has, of course, everyone talking and taking sides. Most of those on the political Right like Newt Gringrich naively dismiss the movement envisionin it as a return to their vision of the 60s Left. Indeed, recently Gingrich opined that "." Ultimately, he instructs those comprising the movement to "Go get a job after you take a bath." On the other hand, however, many on the Left, as Bill Clinton suggested at the Movement's inception, argue that the Occupiers need to develop a message, move into active space, become, philosophically speaking, positivists. Other positivist sympathizers, such as Salon's Todd Gitlin, in his "Liberty Park can be anywhere," suggest that the Occupiers "go home": " Others still warn against fetishizing a particular space.[3]
However, I find the Occupied Space still very important to the movement because it is a visual marker that movement still exists and that clean, well-organized space has become a visual counter to the "Get a shower / Get a job" crowd while serving as a gathering place for community and discussion. What is more, it has become a Utopian space that threatens those--like Gingrich and the rest of the 'Get a Job Crowd'--afraid of an Other, a status-quo apart from that in which they now live.
That the movement engenders such visceral, if predictable, reaction from the Right further proves to me precisely why the movement should reject such calls from the sympathetic Left to remove the tents and progress the movement in other ways. The tents--as Michael Bloomberg's raid suggests--have become an ecosystem apart from the world that surrounds it. And we need to hear Gingrich spout his non-sense again and again because it not only very much contrasts with the facts on the ground but also constantly reminds us of their own ignorance. For example, yelling "get a job" to those who can't jobs in the worst economy anyone alive has ever lived through and telling homeless people, which comprise up to 50 percent of fifty percent of the OccupyDC population, to get a shower positively shouts from the rooftops that the Right is still out of touch with events on the ground.
In fact, it's precisely that the Occupation forces such reactions that proves the movement's worth. It's mere presence, and its ability "grasp its critical negativitity" so disturbs those whom it scares it forces its critical opponents to live critical positivity. In other words, it forces those whom it scares to shout, "Get a job after you get a shower." In Jameson's words, the physical space allows the movement's non-message "to discredit and demystify the claims [. . .] of its opposite number [. . .] its function [therefore] lies not in itself, but in its capabilityt radically to negate its alternative" (175). In other words,
In fact, walking through the park as recently as November 12th presented the opportunity to sit and read in perfect peace; in other words, as I read on the bench, I found myself surrounded by community, a formal space which generated discussion and genuine human interaction. I had more conversation with strangers in the couple of hours I was at McPherson Square than I have the rest of the six months I have lived in DC.
In the Introduction to his tome on Utopia, Archaelogies of the Future: The Desire for Utopia and Other Science Fictions, Frederic Jameson debunks this claim that the left wants to tear down Capitalism. Jameson writes that in fact no one can even envision what a not-capitalist system would look like: "What is crippling is not the presence of an enemy but rather the universal belief, not only that this tendency [Late Capitlism] is irreversible, but that the historic alternatives to capitalism have been proven unviable and impossible, and the that no other socio-economic system is conceivable, let alone practically available" (xii). In other words, until Occupy (perhaps), Late Capitalism was inexorably dismanteling the modern social compact, and, the Left's political class was helping it along. I suggest, therefore, that Occupy's tents create a Utopian space realizes "a system radically different from this one" (Jameson xii). As Jameson notes, at least since Reagan, the nation's political elite (with the help of the media) has been
"tirelessly undoing all the social gains made since the inception of the soicalist and communist movements, repealing all the welfare measures, the safety net, the right to unionization, industrial and exological regulatory laws, offering to privatize pensions and indeed to dismantle whatever stands in the way of the free market all over the world" (xii). In fact, the so-called Tea Party's risible influence on the 2011 budget negotions has brought the destruction of the "social gains" not only to the forefront but as the only solution to the nation's economic problems.
Yet it is not only the invincible universality of capitalism which is at issue: What is crippling is not the presence of an enemy but rather the universal belief, not only that this tendency is irreversible, but that the historic alternatives to capitalism have been proven unviable and impossible, and that no other scoio-economic system is conveivable, let alone practically available. (xii)
After all, labeling a Democrat a "Socialist," not even having to use "Commmunist" has been the Republicans' favorite attack for years. By doing so, the American Right has cut anything less than the cutting of taxes as socialist attack. Therefore, Jameson suggests that
The Utopians not only offer to conceive of such alternate systems; Utopian form is itself a represetnational meditation on radical difference, radical otherness, and on the systemic nature of the social totality, to the point where one cannot imagine any fundamental change in our social esitence which has not first thrown off Utopian visions like so many sparks from a comet. (xii)
In other words, the news that the National Park Service may shut down the OccupationDC's encampment at McPherson Square should trouble us.
The following pictures hearten me; they show what's possible.
I once couldn't conceive that such a protest could occur, much less make an impact.
The fact that some of these "kids" are just "kids" makes this all the more impressive.
I love, too, how it's all so homemade, so analogue.
Joe the Greeter said probably a quarter of the folks in the park are homeless.
I'd like for the entire DC homeless population to occupy each and every Circle in DC.
ADORNO ENJOYMENT (172)
"He told, for instance, an old Eastern Bloc joke (borrowed from the introduction to 2002′s Welcome to the Desert of the Real) about a dissident who’s about to be sent to a work camp in Siberia. Since he knows his letters will be censored, he tells his friends he’ll write to them using a simple code: Blue ink for the truth, red ink for lies. His first letter arrives, and it’s a glowing report of life in the camp—a lovely apartment, great food, beautiful women. Then he concludes, “The only thing we can’t get is red ink.”
"The consolidation of the emergent world market -- for this is really what is at stake in so-called globalization -- can eventually be expected to allow new forms of political agency to develop. In the meantime, to adapt Mrs Thatcher's famous dictum, there is no alternative to Utopia, and late capitalism seems to have no natural enemies (the religous fundamentalisms which resist American or Western imperialisms having by no means endorsed anti-capitalist positions)" (Jameson).
Salon on what next?http://www.salon.com/2011/11/16/liberty_park_can_be_anywhere/
http://loyalopposition.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/11/16/ows-at-the-crossroads/?hp
"If, however, the members of Occupy Wall Street want to do something beyond merely call attention to inequality, they must find a way to organize into a political force, much like the early Tea Party followers did.
Long Piece on Occupy: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/06/nyregion/occupy-wall-street-protest-reaches-a-crossroads.html?pagewanted=1&sq=mayor%20meets%20occupy%20representatives&st=cse&scp=4
About the Meeting with the Mayor: http://mobile.nytimes.com/article?a=868283&single=1&f=21
a
I love, too, how it's all so homemade, so analogue.
Joe the Greeter said probably a quarter of the folks in the park are homeless.
I'd like for the entire DC homeless population to occupy each and every Circle in DC.
ADORNO ENJOYMENT (172)
"He told, for instance, an old Eastern Bloc joke (borrowed from the introduction to 2002′s Welcome to the Desert of the Real) about a dissident who’s about to be sent to a work camp in Siberia. Since he knows his letters will be censored, he tells his friends he’ll write to them using a simple code: Blue ink for the truth, red ink for lies. His first letter arrives, and it’s a glowing report of life in the camp—a lovely apartment, great food, beautiful women. Then he concludes, “The only thing we can’t get is red ink.”
[1] Bill Clinton tells David Letterman that OWS needs "at some point to making some specific suggestions."
[2] Another footnote.
"The consolidation of the emergent world market -- for this is really what is at stake in so-called globalization -- can eventually be expected to allow new forms of political agency to develop. In the meantime, to adapt Mrs Thatcher's famous dictum, there is no alternative to Utopia, and late capitalism seems to have no natural enemies (the religous fundamentalisms which resist American or Western imperialisms having by no means endorsed anti-capitalist positions)" (Jameson).
Salon on what next?http://www.salon.com/2011/11/16/liberty_park_can_be_anywhere/
http://loyalopposition.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/11/16/ows-at-the-crossroads/?hp
"If, however, the members of Occupy Wall Street want to do something beyond merely call attention to inequality, they must find a way to organize into a political force, much like the early Tea Party followers did.
The Tea Partiers recognized that in order to influence the political process they needed to raise money and back candidates. I have no illusions about how steep a hill that is to climb for Occupy Wall Street. They are unlikely to find the same kind of backers within the establishment that the Tea Party did. And the flood of corporate donations unleashed by a reckless Supreme Court makes it hard to be heard at campaign time."
The End of Utopia: http://www.businessweek.com/finance/occupy-wall-street/archives/2011/11/the_end_of_utopia_in_zuccotti_park.html
Op-Ed: http://loyalopposition.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/11/15/nycs-mayor-bloomberg-confronts-occupy-wall-street/?scp=3&sq=occupy%20wall%20street&st=cse
Long Piece on Occupy: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/06/nyregion/occupy-wall-street-protest-reaches-a-crossroads.html?pagewanted=1&sq=mayor%20meets%20occupy%20representatives&st=cse&scp=4
About the Meeting with the Mayor: http://mobile.nytimes.com/article?a=868283&single=1&f=21
a
On what I knew must be one of the last days of warm weather, I decided to grab a book and head down to McPherson Square, grab a bench, and read amongst the tents at OccupyDc. As I was walking down P Street, having just left my flat, in DC's Logan Circle heading towards 14th where I would hang a right toward K Street, I heard a recognizable voice coming from the patio at Logan Tavern, a nice casual restaurant. I turned to notice David Axlerod, the man perhaps most singly responsible for getting electing the current president of the United States, sitting with someone I guessed was his son. Seven minutes from where he was sitting, OccupyDC had set up camp.
It was such a beautiful blue sky indeed, and DC never gets any q
uieter than it was this day. I got incredibly lucky recording this moment in time,
with the kid leaning out his taxi cab window yelling at the encampment. Perfect.
The camp, of
course, was silent from across the street. Once inside the camp, however, only conversations could be heard. Conversations about politics, conversations about what Occupy means to this guy or that one over there. Conversations from passersby wondering if this is what they think it is and others who just wanted to overhear what everyone was else was saying about this thing they may have just stumpled upon.
Conversations.
And interviews, of course, and broadcasts and discussions and conversations and conversations about what and where and why and how and what it all might mean to him or to her or to you or to them.
Energy and activity from something happening or being done and people of various interests wanting to be a part of it in one or another. A part of this conversation.
What I most noticed was activity. Here's several more pictures I took before I ensconsed myself on the bench.
Wednesday, February 17, 2016
Marilyn M. Cooper: The Ecology of Writing
The Ecology of Writing
Marilyn M. Cooper
College English, Vol. 48, No. 4. (Apr., 1986), pp. 364-375.
Stable URL: http·l/!i nksjsror.orglsjci?sjcj-0010-0994%28l98604'f,,>2948o/o3t\4%3C364%3ATEOW%3E2O.C0°k;3B2-F
College English is currently published by National Council of Teachers of English.
Marilyn M. Cooper
The Ecology of Writing
The idea that writing is a process and that the writing process is a recursive cog nitive activity involving certain universal stages (prewriting, writing, revising) seemed quite revolutionary not so many years ago. In 1982, Maxine Hairston hailed "the move to a process-centered theory of teaching writing" as the first sign of a paradigm shift in composition theory (77). But even by then .. process, not product" was the slogan of numerous college textbooks, large and small, validated by enclosure within brightly-colored covers with the imprimatur of Harper & Row, Macmillan, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Scott, Foresman. So revolution dwindles to dogma. Now, perhaps, the time has come for some as sessment of the benefits and limitations of thinking of writing as essentially-and simply-a cognitive process.
Motivation for the paradigm shift in writing theory perhaps came first from writing teachers increasingly disenchanted with red-inking errors, delivering lec tures on comma splices or on the two ways to organize a comparison-contrast essay, and reading alienated and alienating essays written from a list of topic sentences or in the five-paragraph format. Reacting against pedagogy that now seemed completely ineffective, we developed methods that required students to concentrate less on form and more on content, that required them to think. We decided to talk about ideas rather than forms in the classroom and sent students off to do various kinds of free writing and writing using heuristics in order to find out what they thought about a topic-best of all, we found we didn't have to read any of this essential but private and exploratory ''prewriting.'' We told stu dents they had primary responsibility for the purpose of their writing: only they could decide what was important to them to write about, only they could tell whether what they intended was actually fulfilled in the writing they produced. We decided to be friendly readers rather than crabby Miss Fidditches; we said things Jike, "You have lots of ideas," and, with Pirsig's Phaedrus, "You know quality in thought and statement when you see it," instead of "Your essay does not clearly develop a point," and "You have made many usage errors here."
These ideas were in the air-and in print. We developed them in talking with colleagues, in reading the advice of fellow teachers Peter Elbow and Donald Murray. We found further support for them in similar ideas being developed by literary theorists, educational psychologists, and linguists-some of whom were
The Ecology of Writing 365
also writing teachers. In literary theory the shift from a New Critical emphasis on the text to a post-structural emphasis on the reader paralleled the shift from product to process in writing theory. As Jonathan Culler and Stanley Fish adapt ed the nouvelle French notions to American tastes, the complementarity be tween reading and writing in terms of their both being mental processes became clear. Culler states that readers possess "literary competence," that they make sense of texts by applying various conventions that explain how one is to inter pret the cues on the page. Writers, ideally, possess the same literary compe tence. Fish states that readers are guided by interpretive strategies, that these strategies are constitutive of interpretive communities, and that the strategies originate with writers. Culler's conventions, Fish's strategies, are not present in the text; rather, they are part of the mental equipment of writers and readers, and only by examining this mental equipment can we explain how writers and readers communicate.
In the fields of educational psychology and linguistics, research on how read ers process texts also revealed an active reader who used strategies to recreate meaning from the cues on the page. These strategies implied certain expected structures in texts. When adopted by writing teachers, readers' expectations be came a new way of explaining "errors" in student writing and a new rationale for instruction on matters of form. George Dillon, expanding David Olson's anal ysis, attributes much of the incomprehensibility of his students' writing to their inability to shift from the conventions of utterance to the conventions of text, conventions that enjoin explicitness, correctness, novelty, logical consistency, and so forth. Linda Flower and Joseph Williams explain how readers link new information to old information in order to comprehend texts, and they advise students, consequently, to supply context and to clearly mark old and new infor mation in sentence structure.
Gradually, as interest in writing theory increased, a model of writing as a cog nitive process was codified, and the unified perspective the model offered in turn allowed us to redefine other vexing problems: the relation between grammar and writing, the function of revision. These were all undoubtedly beneficial changes. But theoretical models even as they stimulate new insights blind us to some as pects of the phenomena we are studying. The problem with the cognitive pro cess model of writing has nothing to do with its specifics: it describes something of what writers do and goes some way toward explaining how writers, texts, and readers are related. But the belief on which it is based-that writing is thinking and, thus, essentially a cognitive process-obscures many aspects of writing we have come to see as not peripheral.
Like all theoretical models, the cognitive process model projects an ideal im age, in this case an image of a writer that, transmitted through writing pedagogy, influences our attitudes and the attitudes of our students toward writing. The ideal writer the cognitive process model projects is isolated from the social world, a writer I wiU call the solitary author. The solitary author works alone, within the privacy of his own mind. He uses free writing exercises and heuristics to find out what he knows about a subject and to find something he wants to say
366 College English
to others; he uses his analytic skills to discover a purpose, to imagine an audi ence, to decide on strategies, to organize content; and he simulates how his text will be read by reading it over himself, making the final revisions necessary to assure its success when he abandons it to the world of which he is not a part. The isolation of the solitary author from the social world leads him to see ideas and goals as originating primarily within himself and directed at an unknown and largely hostile other. Writing becomes a form of parthenogenesis, the author producing propositional and pragmatic structures, Athena-like, full grown and complete, out of his brow. Thus, the solitary author perceives the functions that writing might serve in limited and abstract terms. All four of the major ped agogical theories James Berlin describes assume that the function of writing is solely cognitive, a matter of discovering the truth and communicating it: the soli tary author can express his feelings, pass on information, persuade others to be lieve as he does, or charm others with his exquisite phrases (cf. Kinneavy's tax onomy of the aims of writing). Finally, the solitary author sees his writing as a goal-directed piece of work, the process of producing a text.
Such images of the solitary author inspire a great deal of what goes on in writ ing classes today-and more of what is recommended in composition textbooks, especially those that depend on the latest theory. But many classes still escape its tyranny, classes in which students engage in group work, activities such as collaborative brainstorming on a topic, discussions and debates of topics or readings, writers reading their texts aloud to others, writers editing other writ ers' texts. Some teachers eschew setting writing assignments (even writing as signments that are ''rhetorically based'') in favor of letting writing emerge from the life-situations of their students, whether this writing takes the form of papers that fulfill requirements for other courses, letters written for employment or business purposes, journals kept as personal records, reports of projects com pleted or in progress. And in some classes, students even use writing to interact with one another: they write suggestions to their teacher and to other students; they produce class newspapers full of interviews, jokes, personal stories, advice, information.
Such changes in writing pedagogy indicate that the perspective allowed by the dominant model has again become too confining. I suggest that what goes on in these classes signals a growing awareness that language and texts are not simply the means by which individuals discover" and communicate information, but are essentially social activities, dependent on social structures and processes not only in their interpretive but also in their constructive phases. I am not, of course, the only-or even the first-writing theorist to notice this. In 1981, for example, Kenneth Bruffee argued that "writing is not an inherently private act but is a displaced social act we perlorm in private for the sake of convenience'' (745). And, more recently, James A. Reither, summarizing the work of four other prominent theorists, comes to the same conclusions I have as the begin ning point of his attempt to redefine the writing process:
the issues [Larson, Odell, Bizzell, and Gage] raise should lead us to won der if our thinking is not being severely limited by a concept of process that
The Ecology of Writing 367
explains only the cognitive processes that occur as people write. Their questions and observations remind us that writing is not merely a process that occurs within contexts. That is, writing and what writers do during writing cannot be artificially separated from the social-rhetorical situations in which writing gets done, from the conditions that enable writers to do what they do, and from the motives writers have for doing what they do. (621)
The idea that language use is essentially social also underlies much current work in literary theory and sociolinguistics. David Bleich proposes a literature classroom in which students transform their initial responses to a text into com munally negotiated and thus valid interpretations: "although the resymbolization of a text is usually a fully private affair, it is always done in reference to some communal effort" (137). Fredric Jameson, perhaps the foremost of the neo Marxist theorists, argues that interpretation '' must take place within three con centric frameworks, which mark a widening out of the sense of the social ground of a text" (75). Among linguists, William Labov is renowned for his demonstra tions that the so-called verbal deprivation of children in ghetto schools is an ar tifact of the means of data collection, face-to-face interviews of black children by white adult investigators, and that "the consistency of certain grammatical rules [of black English vernacular] is a fine-grained index of membership in the street culture" (255). And in Ways with Words, a book already nearly as influen tial as Labov's Language in the Inner City, Shirley Brice Heath delineates the complex relationship between children's differential acquisition of reading and the uses of and attitudes toward texts in their home communities.
Just as such research calls for new models of the interpretation of literature and of language use, so too do the intuitively developed methods we are now be ginning to use in writing classes and in literacy programs call for a new model of writing. Describing such a model explicitly will lend coherence to these intui tions by bringing out the assumptions on which they are based, illuminating as pects of writing that we have perceived but dimly heretofore through the gaps in the cognitive process model.
What I would like to propose is an ecological model of writing, whose funda mental tenet is that writing is an activity through which a person is continually engaged with a variety of socially constituted systems. Ecology, the science of natural environments, has been recently mentioned by writing researchers such as Greg Myers, who, in his analysis of the social construction of two biologists' proposals, concludes: "Like ethologists, we should not only observe and cate gorize the behavior of individuals, we should also consider the evolution of this behavior in its ecological context" (240). The term ecological is not, however, simply the newest way to say "contextual"; it points up important differences between the model I am proposing and other contextual models such as Kenneth Burke's dramatistic pentad.
Such models, oddly, abstract writing from the social context in much the way that the cognitive process model does; they perceive the context in which a piece of writing is done as unique, unconnected with other situations. Kenneth
368 College English
Burke's is perhaps the best contextual model that is applied to writing; Burke develops a heuristic for interrogating the immediate situation in order to impute motives for individual language acts. The terms of his pentad are conceived of as formal or transcendent, and Burke tellingly labels his description of them a "grammar," a model of "the purely internal relationships which the five terms bear to one another'' (xvi). Actual statements about motives utilize these ''gram matical resources," but the grammar determines the statements only in a formal sense, much as syntactic rules predict the occurrence of certain structures in sentences. One's perspective, or "philosophy," crucially guides how the terms will be applied, and, since Burke proposes no link between the grammar and the perspective, what perspective is chosen appears to be arbitrary, and, perhaps, trivial: "War may be treated as an Agency, insofar as it is a means to an end; as a collective Act, subdivisible into many individual acts; as a Purpose, in schemes proclaiming a cult of war" (xx). Thus, though the grammar allows one to assign labels to important aspects of a situation, it does not enable one to ex plain how the situation is causally related to other situations. Burke is perhaps more aware of the limitations of his model than are some of his disciples. The description of linguistic forms the pentad enables is, in his opinion, "preparato ry": "the study of linguistic action is but beginning" (319).
In contrast, an ecology of writing encompasses much more than the individual writer and her immediate context. An ecologist explores how writers interact to form systems: all the characteristics of any individual writer or piece of writing both determine and are determined by the characteristics of all the other writers and writings in the systems. An important characteristic of ecological systems is that they are inherently dynamic; though their structures and contents can be specified at a given moment, in real time they are constantly changing, limited only by parameters that are themselves subject to change over longer spans of time. In their critique of sociobiology, R. C. Lewontin
et al.
describe how such systems operate:
all organisms-but especially human beings-are not simply the results but are also the causes of their own environments .... While it may be true that at some instant the environment poses a problem or challenge to the organism, in the process of response to that challenge the organism alters the terms of its relation to the outer world and recreates the relevant as pects of that world. The relation between organism and environment is not simply one of interaction of internal and external factors, but of a dialec tical development of organism and milieu in response to each other. (275) In place of the static and limited categories of contextual models, the ecological model postulates dynamic interlocking systems which structure the social ac tivity of writing.
The systems are not given, not limitations on writers; instead they are made and remade by writers in the act of writing. It is in this sense that writing changes social reality and not only, as Lloyd Bitzer argues, in response to ex igence. A historian writes a letter of appreciation to an anthropologist whose ar ticle she has read and connects with a new writer with whom she can exchange
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ideas and articles. A college president who decides to write a Christmas letter to his faculty creates a new textual form that will affect his other communications and at the same time alters, slightly, the administrative structure of his institu tion.
Furthermore, the systems are concrete. They are structures that can be inves tigated, described, altered; they are not postulated mental entities, not gener alizations. Every individual writer is necessarily involved in these systems: for each writer and each instance of writing one can specify the domain of ideas ac tivated and supplemented, the purposes that stimulated the writing and that re sulted from it, the interactions that took place as part of the writing, the cultural norms and textual forms that enabled and resulted from the writing.
One can abstractly distinguish different systems that operate in writing, just as one can distinguish investment patterns from consumer spending patterns from hiring patterns in a nation's economy. But in the actual activity of writ ing-as in the economy-the systems are entirely interwoven in their effects and manner of operation. The systems reflect the various ways writers connect with one another through writing: through systems of ideas, of purposes, of interper sonal interactions, of cultural norms, of textual forms.
The system of ideas is the means by which writers comprehend their world, to turn individual experiences and observations into knowledge. From this per spective ideas result from contact, whether face-to-face or mediated through texts. Ideas are also always continuations, as they arise within and modify par ticular fields of discourse. One does not begin to write about bird behavior, say, without observing birds, talking with other observers, and reading widely in the literature of animal behavior in general. One does not even begin to have ideas about a topic, even a relatively simple one, until a considerable body of already structured observations and experiences has been mastered. Even in writing where the focus is not on the development of knowledge, a writer must connect with the relevant idea system: if one is recommending ways to increase the effi ciency of a particular department of a publishing firm, one must understand what the department does and how it fits into the firm as a whole.
The system of purposes is the means by which writers coordinate their ac tions. Arguments attempt to set agendas; promises attempt to set schedules and relationships. Purposes, like ideas, arise out of interaction, and individual pur poses are modified by the larger purposes of groups; in fact, an individual im pulse or need only becomes a purpose when it is recognized as such by others. A contributor to a company newspaper writes about his interest in paleontology; his individual purpose is to express himself, to gain attention, purposes we all recognize; but within the context of the company newspaper, his purpose is also to deepen his relationship with other employees.
The system of interpersonal interactions is the means by which writers regu late their access to one another. Two determinants of the nature of a writer's in teractions with others are intimacy, a measure of closeness based on any sim ilarity seen to be relevant-kinship, religion, occupation; and power, a measure of the degree to which a writer can control the action of others (for a particularly detailed discussion of these factors, see Brown and Levinson). Writers may play
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a number of different roles in relation to one another: editor, co-writer, or ad dressee, for instance. Writers signal how they view their relationship with other writers through conventional forms and strategies, but they can also change their relationship-or even initiate or terminate relationships-through the use of these conventions if others accept the new relationship that is implied.
The system of cultural norms is the means by which writers structure the larger groups of which they are members. One always writes out of a group; the notion of what role a writer takes on in a particular piece of writing derives from this fact. I write here as a member of the writing theory group, and as I write I express the attitudes and institutional arrangements of this group-and I attempt to alter some of them.
The system of textual forms is, obviously, the means by which writers com municate. Textual forms, like language forms in general, are at the same time conservative, repositories of tradition, and revolutionary, instruments of new forms of action. A textual form is a balancing act: conventional enough to be comprehensible and flexible enough to serve the changing purposes of writing. Thus, new forms usually arise by a kind of cross-breeding, or by analogy, as older forms are taken apart and recombined or modified in a wholesale fashion.
The metaphor for writing suggested by the ecological model is that of a web, in which anything that affects one strand of the web vibrates throughout the whole. To reiterate, models are ways of thinking about, or ways of seeing, com plex situations. If we look at, for example, a particularly vexed problem in cur rent writing theory, the question of audience, from the perspective of this model, we may be able to reformulate the question in a way that helps us to find new answers. Though I cannot attempt a complete analysis of the concept of audi ence here, I would like to outline briefly how such an analysis rpight proceed.
The discussion of how authors should deal with their audience has in recent years focused on the opposition between those who argue that authors must ana lyze the characteristics of a real audience and those who argue that authors al ways imagine, or create, their audience in their writing. The opposition, of course, has classical roots: in the Phaedrus Plato suggests that the rhetorician classify types of audiences and consider which type of speech best suits each; while, at the other extreme, epideictic rhetoric sometimes took the form of a contest in which speakers imagined an audience. Lisa Ede and Andrea Lunsford characterize "the two central perspectives on audience in composition" as "audience addressed and audience invoked" (156). Douglas Park identifies the conception of audience "as something readily identifiable and external" with Lloyd Bitzer, and the opposite conception of audience as represented to con sciousness, or invented, with Walter Ong (248).
I would like to draw attention, however, to what unites both these perspec tives: whether the writer is urged to analyze or invent the audience, the audience is always considered to be a construct in the writer's mind. Park specifies four meanings of audience, then argues that "the last two meanings are obviously the most important for teachers or for anyone interested in forms of discourse'': "the set of conceptions or awareness in the writer's consciousness," and "an ideal conception shadowed forth in the way the discourse defines and creates
The Ecology of Writing 371
contexts" (250). Park concludes, "Any systematic answers to these important questions will depend upon keeping in constant view the essential abstractness of the concept of audience'' (250).
The internalization of the audience, making it into a mental construct often la beled the "general audience," is inescapable within the perspective of the cog nitive process model. By focusing our attention on what goes on in an author's mind, it forces us to conceive all significant aspects of writing in terms of mental entities. Even Fred Pfister and Joanne Petrick, often cited as proponents of the idea of real audiences, begin by conceding that for writers the "audience is un seen, a phantom .... Students, like all writers, must fictionalize their audience. But they must construct in the imagination an audience that is as nearly a replica as is possible of those many readers who actually exist in the world of reality and who are reading the writer's words" (213-14). Less surprisingly, in her text book Linda Flower labels one of her "problem-solving strategies for writing" "talk to your reader," but she actually recommends that the writer play both roles in the conversation (73).
Barry Kroll, who breaks down approaches to audience into three perspec tives-the rhetorical, the informational, and the social-demonstrates, in his def inition of the third perspective, how pervasive the tendency to internalize all as pects of writing is: "writing for readers is, like all human communication, a fundamentally social activity, entailing processes of inferring the thoughts and feelings of the other persons involved in an act of communication" ("Writing for Readers" 179). The redefinition of social activity as a cognitive process is even more striking here in that it is unmarked, mentioned as an afterthought in the gerundive phrase. Kroll goes on to conclude, "From (the social] view, the pro cess of writing for readers inevitably involves social thinking-or 'social cogni tion'" (182-83). In a more recent discussion of studies of the relation between social-cognitive abilities and writing performance, Kroll more clearly advocates the social-cognitive approach to audience: "It seems reasonable that individuals who can think in more complex ways about how other people think ought to be better writers" ("Social-Cognitive Ability" 304). But, as he also admits, "suc cessful performance (in terms of creating texts that are adapted to readers' needs) may not always reflect social-cognitive competence, because writers probably learn to employ many of the linguistic and rhetorical devices of audience-adapted writing without needing to consider their readers' charac teristics, perspectives, or responses" (304).
As should be obvious, the perspective of the ecological model offers a salu tary correction of vision on the question of audience. By focusing our attention on the real social context of writing, it enables us to see that writers not only analyze or invent audiences, they, more significantly, communicate with and know their audiences. They learn to employ the devices of audience-adapted writing by handing their texts to colleagues to read and respond to, by revising articles or memos or reports guided by comments from editors or superiors, by reading others' summaries or critiques of their own writing. Just as the ecologi cal model transforms authors (people who have produced texts) into writers (people engaged in writing), it transforms the abstract "general audience" into
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real readers (for an insightful discussion of the use of "audience" vs. "reader," see Park 249-50).
These real readers do appear in discussions of audience dominated by the cognitive process model, if only in glimpses. Ruth Mitchell and Mary Taylor point out that "the audience not only judges writing, it also motivates it. A writ er answers a challenge, consciously or unconsciously. The conscious challenges are assignments, demands for reports, memos, proposals, letters" (250-51). Ede and Lunsford criticize Mitchell and Taylor's model from the familiar cognitive process perspective: "no matter how much feedback writers may receive after they have written something (or in breaks while they write), as they compose writers must rely in large part upon their own vision of the reader, which they create ... according to their own experiences and expectations" (158). But in their account of the readers of their own article, it is the real readers who are ob viously most important: "a small, close-knit seminar group"; each other; Rich ard Larson, who "responded in writing with questions, criticisms, and sug gestions, some of which we had, of course, failed to anticipate"; and readers of College Composition and Communication, pictured as "members of our own de partments, a diverse group of individuals with widely varying degrees of interest in and knowledge of composition" (167-68). Ede and Lunsford know their read ers through real social encounters; the cognitive act of analyzing them or creat ing them is superfluous. As Park suggests, "as a general rule it is only in highly structured situations or at particular times that writers consciously focus on audience as a discrete entity" (254).
The focus on readers as real social beings opens up new vistas for research on audience and for classroom methods. Questions we might seek answers to in clude: What kind of interactions do writers and readers engage in? What is the nature of the various roles readers play in the activity of writing? What institu tional arrangements encourage writer-reader interaction? How do writers find readers to work with? How do writers and readers develop ideas together? How do writers and readers alter textual forms together?
· In the classroom, we can enable our students to see each other as real read ers, not as stand-ins for a general audience. Students learn about how to deal with their readers not ''by internalizing and generalizing the reactions of a number of specific readers" and thereby developing a "sense of audience" (Kroll, "Writing for Readers" 181), but by developing the habits and skills in volved in finding readers and making use of their responses. Students, like all writers, need to find out what kind of readers best help them in the role of editor, how to work with co-writers, how to interpret criticisms, how to enter into dialogue with their addressees.
In contrast, then, to the solitary author projected by the cognitive process model, the ideal image the ecological model projects is of an infinitely extended group of people who interact through writing, who are connected by the various systems that constitute the activity of writing. For these "engaged writers" ideas are not so much fixed constructs to be transferred from one mind to the page and thence to another mind; instead, ideas are out there in the world, a landscape that is always being modified by ongoing human discourse. They "find
The Ecology of Writing 373
ideas'' in writing because they thus enter the field of discourse, finding in the ex change of language certain structures that they modify to suit their purposes. Nor for them do purposes arise solely out of individual desires, but rather arise out of the interaction between their needs and the needs of the various groups that structure their society. As Dell Hymes says about purposes in speaking, "Ultimately, the functions served ... must be derived directly from the pur poses and needs of human persons engaged in social action, and are what they are: talking [or writing] to seduce, to stay awake, to avoid a war" (70). The vari ous roles people take on in writing also arise out of this social structure: through interacting with others, in writing and speaking, they learn the functions and tex tual forms of impersonal reporting, effective instruction, irony, story-telling. In the same way they learn the attitudes toward these roles and toward purposes and ideas held by the various groups they interact with, and they come to under stand how these interactions are themselves partly structured by institutional procedures and arrangements. These attitudes, procedures, and arrangements make up a system of cultural norms which are, however, neither stable nor uni form throughout a culture. People move from group to group, bringing along with them different complexes of ideas, purposes, and norms, different ways of interacting, different interpersonal roles and textual forms. Writing, thus, is seen to be both constituted by and constitutive of these ever-changing systems, sys tems through which people relate as complete, social beings, rather than imagin ing each other as remote images: an author, an audience.
It is important to remember that the image the ecological model projects is again an ideal one. In reality, these systems are often resistent to change and not easily accessible. Whenever ideas are seen as commodities they are not shared; whenever individual and group purposes cannot be negotiated someone is shut out; differences in status, or power, or intimacy curtail interpersonal interac tions; cultural institutions and attitudes discourage writing as often as they en courage it; textual forms are just as easily used as barriers to discourse as they are used as means of discourse. A further value of the ecological model is that it can be used to diagnose and analyze such situations, and it encourages us to di rect our corrective energies away from the characteristics of the individual writ er and toward imbalances in social systems that prevent good writing; one such analysis by my colleague Michael Holzman appeared recently in CE.
Writing is one of the activities by which we locate ourselves in the enmeshed systems that make up the social world. It is not simply a way of thinking but more fundamentally a way of acting. As Wilhelm von Humboldt says of lan guage, it "is not work (ergon) but activity (energia)" (27), an activity through which we become most truly human. By looking at writing ecologically we un derstand better how important writing is-and just how hard it is to teach.
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