In The Shock Doctrine, Klein describes the policies of the late University of Chicago economics professor Milton Friedman, and the conditions needed for his policies to be implemented. Friedman’s policies, referred to as neoliberalism, are the rejection of Keynesian economics; the privatization of all social services; avoiding taxation; the erasing of national borders; the belief in individual freedom equating to individual economic freedom and consumer choice; the removal of all governmental regulations concerning commerce, business, and labor; the belief that economics is a force of nature, reacts to a set of natural laws, and these ebbs and flows can be best described by neoliberal economics; the eradication of tariffs and trade restrictions; and the disbanding of workers’ unions. Klein’s primary claim–supported by public statements made by Friedman and the current situation in New Orleans or the history of Pinochet regime in Chile–is that neoliberalism is only possible after a traumatic event, that is, like the military coup in Chile (or Indonesia) or New Orleans after Katrina. Moreover, Klein asserts these traumatic events are needed since neoliberalism directly contradicts the traditional expectations (and voting records) of citizens living in democratic-republics, and thus, only with such a shock to the social-political status quo is it possible to deploy these policies. Klein’s claim, from this point, evolves to a declaration that neoliberalism is anti-democratic as well as beneficial only to a given country’s preexisting socio-economic elite or mega-corporations.

This book is a challenge to the central and most cherished claim in the official story–that the triumph of deregulated capitalism has been born of freedom, that unfettered free markets go hand in hand with democracy. Instead, I will show that this fundamentalist form of capitalism has consistently been midwifed by the most brutal forms of coercion, inflicted on the collective politic as we on countless individual bodies. The history of the contemporary free market–better understood as the rise of corporatism–was written in shocks. (18)

Having been part of the movement against ballooning corporate power that made its global debut in Seattle in 1999, I was accustomed to seeing similar business-friendly policies imposed through arm-twisting at World Trade Organization summits, or as the conditions attached to loans from the International Monetary Fund. The three trademark demands–privatization, government, deregulation and deep cuts to social spending–tended to be extremely unpopular with citizens, but when the agreements were signed there was still at least the pretext of mutual consent between the governments doing the negotiating, as well as consensus among the supposed experts. Now the same ideological program was being imposed via the most baldly coercive means possible: under foreign military occupation after an invasion, or immediately following a cataclysmic natural disaster… as Friedman understood, the atmosphere of large-scale crisis provided the necessary pretext to overrule the expressed wishes of voters and to hand the country over to economic “technocrats.”(9, 10)

The bottom line is that while Friedman’s economic model is capable of being partially imposed under democracy, authoritarian conditions are required for the implementation of its true version. (11)

Shock Therapy in the US begins on page 11.

Now wars and disaster responses are so fully privatized that they are themselves the new market; there is no need to wait until after the war for the boom–the medium is the message. (13)

On page 14, Klein asserts neoliberalism is known as “free trade” or “globalization” throughout the rest of the world.

For those inside the bubble of extreme wealth created by such an arrangement, there can be no more profitable way to organize society. But because of the obvious drawbacks for the vast majority of the population left outside the bubble, other features of the corporatist state tend to include aggressive surveillance (once again, with government and large corporations trading favors and contracts), mass incarceration, shrinking civil liberties and often, though not always, torture. (16)

That is how the shock doctrine works: the original disaster–the coup, the terrorist attack, the market meltdown, the war, the tsunami, the hurricane–puts the entire population into a state of collective shock. The falling bombs, the bursts of terror, the pounding winds serve to soften up whole societies much as the blaring music and blows in the toture cells soften up prisoners. Like the terrorized prisoner who gives up the names of comrades and renounces his faith, shocked societies often give up things they would fiercely protect. (17)

The comparison of neoliberalism to torture begins on page 25. Interesting point: The shocked therapy patient needs a strong parental figure (think Bush or Pinochet). The drive is to create a blank slate and for the administrator to reteach the newly blank individual everything as if s/he is a child. Probably why neoliberalism is best deployed in a dictatorship.

On page 60 the recounting of teaching Chicago style economics begins. Much like in Seattle ’99 or OWS, there has to be a teaching, the creation of an ethos that still involves agency on the part of the student.

Page 80–Klein points out that local businesses can’t compete in these conditions. Only corporations can survive in neoliberal economy.

Page 81–Friedman’s naivety when it comes to employment. Based on “science” and “mathematics.”

Page 84–Klein explains how the Chile was not a perfect laboratory. It’s infrastructure was propped up by nationalized industries.

“The violation of human rights, the system of institutionalized brutality, the drastic control and suppression of every form of meaningful dissent is discussed (and often condemned) as a phenomenon only indirectly linked, or indeed entirely unrelated, to the classical unrestrained ‘free market’ policies that have been enforced by the military junta,” Letelier wrote in a searing essay for The Nation. He pointed out that “this particularly convenient concept of a social system, in which ‘economic freedom’ and political terror coexist without touching each other, allows these financial spokesmen to support their concept of ‘freedom’ while exercising their verbal muscles in defense of human rights.” (Orlando Letelier qtd in Klein 99).

The vast majority of the victims of the Southern Cone’s terror apparatus were not members of armed groups but non-violent activists working in factories, farms, shantytowns and universities. They were economists, artists, psychologists and left-wing party loyalists. They were killed not because of their weapons (which most did not have) but because of their beliefs. In the Southern Cone, where contemporary capitalism was born, the “War on Terror” was a war against all obstacles to the new order. (97)

The Chicago Boys and their professors…believed in a form of capitalism that is purist by its very nature. Theirs is a system based entirely on a belief in “balance” and “order” and the need to be free of interferences and “distortions” in order to succeed. Because of these traits, a regime committed to the faithful application of this ideal cannot accept the presence of competing or tempering worldviews. In order for the ideal to be achieved, it requires a monopoly on ideology; otherwise, according to the central theory, the economic signals become distorted and the entire system is thrown out of balance. (102,103)

The above quote could explain the militarized responses to all forms of dissent from the Battle for Seattle to OWS.

The majority of the people swept up in the raids were not “terrorists,” as the rhetoric claimed, but rather the people whom the juntas had identified as posing the most serious barriers to their economic program. Some were actual opponents, but many were simply seen as representing values contrary to the revolution’s. (106)

106 Klein recounts how the military governments of Argentina and Chile systematically targeted unions and their leaders; the leaders were often arrested/kidnapped, tortured, and then “disappeared.”

The torturers understood the importance of solidarity well, and they set out to shock that impulse of social interconnectedness out of their prisoners. Of course all interrogation is purportedly about gaining valuable information and therefore forcing betrayal, but many prisoners report that their torturers were far less interested in the information, which they usually already possessed, than in achieving the act of betrayal itself. The point of the exercise was getting prisoners to do irreparable damage to that part of themselves that believed in helping others above all else, that part of themselves that made them activists, replacing it with shame and humiliation. (112)

On page 124, Klein makes clear that the international rights movement, while responsible for stopping the most brutal abuses in Chile and Argentina, was also in and of itself debilitating in making sense of the respective coups. The language of these movements is scrubbed clean of political ideology and sponsored by corporate philanthropist groups, which ensured “it was all but impossible to ask the question underlying the violence it was documenting: Why was it happening, in whose interests?”.

Simone de Beauvoir, writing on the same subject, concurred: “To protest in the name of morality against ‘excesses’ or ‘abuses’ is an error which hints at active complicity. There are no ‘abuses’ or ‘excesses’ here, simply an all-pervasive system.” (126)

But like Cameron’s former patient Gail Kastner, with her intricate architecture of papers, books and lists, recollections can be rebuilt, new narratives can be created. Memory, both individual and collective, turns out to be the greatest shock absorber of all. (463)

This is what collectives or social movements provide: the ability to bridge the gap between reality and understanding through the creation of new narratives (worldviews) built on organic (versus official) memory.

In this article Scott and Herndl discuss the Midwest Pain Group’s (MPG) attempts to collaborate across disciplinary differences to transform the discourse and practice of pain science. Explaining what the MPG does as a rhetorical process (a moment where specialists from different medical specialties gather and try to discursively/use probabilistic reasoning to work out new definitions of pain breaking Descartes’ mind/body dualism), Herndl and Scott use Foucault’s enunciative analysis and stasis theory to explain the process the members of the MPG are participating in as they attempt to change the professional discourse concerning (and consequently, eventually, the practice of dealing with) pain. What I find most important can be summed up by a few sentences found within the article’s abstract.

Foucault’s enunciative analysis explains how discourse formations regulate statements, but not how formations can be transformed. We argue that stases can be thought of as nodes in the networks of statements Foucault describes and that stasis theory explains the rhetorical means through which members of the MPG transform the discourse of pain science. (145)

Through this hybrid approach, Scott and Herndl argue MPG members create a meta-discourse at their meetings, allowing for a moment of invention where new definitional topos are created.

The three stases Graham and Herndl identify as at work in the discourse of the MPG:

(1) interpretive-definitive stasis, which asks “What does construct y mean?” and (2) evidential-translative, which asks: “Which from among alternative evidence better addresses the ambiguities about existence?” The third stasis, which we call the practical-translative, we infer from our data in order to account for stasis issues in medical practice. (155)

Why Graham and Herndl marry enuciative analysis to stasis theory:

Enunciative analysis studies the “disruption of gaps, voids, absences, limits, divisions” that govern the dispersion of statements and the specification of objects by discursive formations (119). Such analysis separates what gets said from what cannot be said because it lies outside the regular formation of objects and statements that characterize discourse…Foucault argues that “the purpose [of analysis] is to map, in a particular discursive practice, the point at which they [contradictions] are constituted, to define the form they assume, the relations they have to each other, and the domain they govern”(155-56). This mapping exposes the shape of discursive fomratinos and how they regulate statements, but it does not articulate a theory of change or identify any mechanism through which subject might change discursive practices and formations. Foucault’s analsysis recognizes the existnence of contradictions and incoherence in discursive formations, but fails to explain how change might occur. (151)

Important note: Graham and Herndl claim this type of transformative discourse occurs “off-label,” or when the MPG members talk after the official presentations at every meeting. The talk during the presentations (even the Q&A it seems) is restricted by disciplinary conventions and jargon as well as FDA and DEA regulations.

Prelli et al use the space of their article to discuss Burke’s concept of recalcitrance taking into account Burke’s development of the term throughout his (Burke’s) career. For Prelli et al, recalcitrance has “distinctive, interconnected, and decidedly Burkean dimensions as a realist term, as communication term and critical term” (98, emphasis mine). According to Prelli et al, Burke’s full definition of recalcitrance spans Permanence and Change as well as Attitudes Towards History, explaining to their readers Burke:

asserted that the term as used in Permanence and Change encompassed the “subtle shifts from the similar to the antithetical” that occur whenever people attempt to come to terms with a situation’s meaning. Recalcitrance, Burke wrote, “refers to the factors that substantiate a statement, the factors that incite a statement, and the factors that correct a statement.” (Attidudes, vol. 1, 60; Attitudes, 3rd ed., 47n). (97).

The point of this is to create a full understanding of the term, and a full understanding emerges through an examination of

previous and partial uses and occasional misuses of the term that 1) deploy the terms as a realist conception to delineate both the extent to which knowledge is rhetorical and the degree to which the discourses of the physical sciences are fully amenable to rhetorical analysis, obscuring its relationship to Burke’s realism in the process; 2) allude to the term as a communication conception during an effort to incorporate Levina’s notion of phenomenological encounters with concrete, individual others within Burke’s dramatistic perspective; and 3) employ the terms as a critical conception with which to develop more trenchant perspectives for contemporary rhetorical criticism, particularly as conducted in the developing field of eco-criticism. (98)

The following quotes focus on Burke’s realism.

[Burke] continued: “Once you introduce a point of view into the universe…(as it is introduced by biological vocation)” that “point of view requires an interpretation of evnets, a reading of the recalcitrant factors favorable and unfavorable to the point of view” (257, n2). As we attempt o “corroborate” or “externalize” a point of view, we should expect to find that much significant “material of externalization is recalcitrant” (257). Burke saw those materials as “opportunistic” since they enabled revisions–shifts in terminological strategy–that better encompass a situation’s meaning (257). Only through revision of terminolgical strategies in view of recalcitrant materials can we make “discoveries” about the situation that otherwise could not have been made and, thus, substantiate an unfolding point of view (257). Revision of any perspective, scientific or other, enacts an interpretation that involves “a reading of the recalcitrant factors favorable to the point of view.” (101)

Given the inextricable connection between points of view and recalcitrant materials, one might interpret Burke’s position as culminating in subjectivism, solipsism, or relativism. But, to the contrary, Burke argued that his position “does not imply that the universe is merely the product of our interpretations. For the interpretations themselves must be altered as the universe displays various orders of recalcitrance to them” (256)…Thus, recalcitrant materials enable Burke to avert relativism, solipsism, or subjectivism since they are not mere projections upon the world but can function both to substantiate and to expose error in a developing point of view. (103)

Burke’s concept of recalcitrance was influenced by realism that broadened rather than narrowed the range of what constitutes the real and objective. Whenever we enact a perspective we necessarily encounter such real and objective recalcitrant materials as (1) our orientation’s motivating intentions; (2) the interests that spur those intentions; (3) the perceptual, formal, social, and linguistic factors that incite terminological responses; (4) the situation itself inclusive of political, social, and economic factors; (5) strategic and stylistic revisions and the “discoveries,” substantiations, and corrections they yield; (6) situated others with whom one attempts to communicate, translate, or socialize, a perspective; and, we should add, (7) language and terminologies that critics can cite and disclose for others’ situation. All are manifestations of the real and objective world and thus index recalcitrant materials that could resist or corroborate, substantiate or correct, support or undermine, efforts to encompass a situation from any given terminological point of view. (120)

From Burke’s realist position, any perspective and not just scientific perspectives could escape relativism, solipsism or subjectivism insofar as it grappled with the recalcitrant factors it disclosed. (120)

Burke assumed the existence of non-symbolic realities, as we alluded to earlier regarding his distinction between symbolic action and nonsymbolic motion. If all symbolizing beings were to vanish there would still remain matter in motion. But, more precisely for Burke, as disclosed in our analysis of his realism, if all symbolizing beings were to vanish not only would “subjective” points of view disappear with them, but so too would the entire range of “objective” and “real” materials they disclosed about the world. Whenever we interpret situations, we necessarily carve out, abstract, shape, or otherwise experience whatever constitutes real and objective materials from a point of view. When we do so, we disclose real and objective recalcitrant materials that could substantiate, incite, or correct statements, whether symbolic or non-symbolic in origins. (120)

Selzer, Jack. “Habeas Corpus: An Introduction.” Rhetorical Bodies. Eds. Jack Selzer and Sharon Crowley. Madison, WI: The U of Wisconsin P, 1999. 3-15. Print.

In this introduction Selzer explains the focus of the anthology, saying:

It is a sustained meditation on material rhetoric in both senses of the term-a meditation on the material aspects and groundings of language as rhetorical action as it is traditionally conceived, and on the rhetorical nature of material realities, whether they are literate realities or not. Without opposing too firmly the material and the literate, the contributors together consider what it might mean to take very seriously the material conditions that sustain the production, circulation, and consumption of rhetorical power (whether that power is in a text or speech or some other physical form), and the book accordingly sustains two complementary general propositions. First, the contributors insist that material, nonliterate practices and realities-most notably, the body, flesh, blood, and bones, and how all the material trappings of the physical are fashioned by literate practices-should come under rhetorical scrutiny. Second, they demonstrate how literate practices-the speeches and texts that are the traditional staple of rhetoric, as well as the ads and virtual spaces and languages associated with the new media-ought to be understood in the serious light of the material circumstances that sustain or sustained them. (9-10)

This drive to understand how rhetoric and material reality work together is described by Selzer’s discussion of Burke.

While it is true, as Burke was explaining from the first moments of social constructionism, in his Permanence and Change (1935), that people can never get outside the constructions and conventions of discourse, it is also true(as Burke noted in the same book) that neither can we construct ourselves outside the materiality of everyday life: “The universe is not merely the product of our interpretations. For the interpretations themselves must be altered as the universe displays various orders of recalcitrance to them …. Our calling has its roots in the biological, and our biological demands are clearly implicit in the universal texture” (256). Nevertheless, material moments of rhetorical action like the ones I have described have largely remained beyond the reach of rhetoricians, who have traditionally (and understandably) been most attentive to oral and written discourses, narrowly conceived. Even though rhetoric has long been concerned with the situatedness of literate acts and the real effects of discourse rather than with ideal possibilities, the relationship of rhetorical events to the material world that sustains and produces them has not often enough been fully elaborated or clearly articulated. (9)

Here’s two interesting questions Selzer asks at the end of the introduction: “Should something substitute for the notion of the ‘material’ that has prevailed under the aegis of Marx? If ‘materialism’ now takes us to bodies and to tangible physicality instead of to Marx, what happens to Marxist categories?” (10).

Blair, Carole. “Contemporary US Memorial Sites as Exemplars of Rhetoric’s Materiality.”Rhetorical Bodies. Eds. Jack Selzer and Sharon Crowley. Madison, WI: The U of Wisconsin P, 1999. 16-57. Print.

In this essay, Blair asks readers to consider the materiality of rhetoric by moving away from the traditional notions of rhetoric as a means to achieve the goal(s) of a specific writer/speaker. Due to liberal humanism (and the location of several rhetoricians within humanities departments) rhetoric is often seen as symbolic (or symbolizing or symbolic communication) as well as a set of practices for one actor to achieve a specific goal. Often the goal is to persuade, or influence, or to communicate effectively, which for Blair is all well and good; however, she explains that while these models are “reasonably accurate description of the motivations people have for engaging in rhetorical practices…it describes a motivation rather than an essential or definitive characteristic of rhetoric” (21). More importantly, this way of conceptualizing rhetoric “creates additional difficulties for rethinking rhetoric as material” (21).

For Blair the thinking of rhetoric as material means thinking of rhetoric as having some type of consequence beyond what the speaker/writer intended, and simultaneously, having an effect on experiential reality, too.

Even rhetorical critics, whose own role is reception, return their readers to questions of invention, contextual contingency, and the construction of the rhetorical text far more than they ever deal with what happens to or with a text, once it has been. produced. Rarely is consequence taken up as the central focus of our study. When it is addressed at all, it is typically advanced as a reason to study the construction (production values, if you will) of a particular text; and it is frequently understood narrowly as “success” or goal fulfillment. That is, critics typically argue that a particular rhetorical text is worth our attention because it was successful: it achieved the goal of its maker. Such an argument refers us to the goal of the rhetor as if it were the only possible or legitimate measure of effect (Cherwitz and Theobald-Osborne 56)…Nonetheless, the narrow study of effect, understood as goal fulfillment, diverts us from the partisau character of rhetoric, except for the constricted arena of ends-means assessments…How do we begin to theorize materiality, in the face of these obstacles? If the material character of rhetoric is not reducible to its symbolicity, and if materiality implicates us in issues of consequence aud partisanship beyond that of the rhetor’s goals, where do we begin? Two answers are already available in the question itself. If rhetoric’s materiality is not a function of its symbolic constructions of meaning, then we must look elsewhere: we must ask not just what a text meaus but, more generally, what it does; aud we must not understand what it does as adhering strictly to what it was supposed to do. Both these directives open a vast field for us to contemplate, and thus I believe that we can begin most effectively by attending to instances of rhetoric aud what they can tell us about their own materiality. (21-22, 23)

To begin thinking about the materiality of rhetoric (this seems to be an exercise for herself as well as her reader), Blair considers five memorial sites (the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, the AIDS Memorial Quilt, the Civil Rights Memorial, Kent State University’s May 4 Memorial, and the Witch Trials Tercentenary Memorial) while using five questions to guide her exploration of each as a rhetorical text. The five questions are:

(1) What is the significance of the text’s material existence? (2) What are the apparatuses and degrees of durability displayed by the text? (3) What are the text’s modes or possibilities of reproduction or preservation? (4) What does the text do to (or with, or against) other texts? (5) How does the text act on people? (30)

Blair also stresses that

In raising these particular questions, I do not mean to imply that others might be less important; moreover, each of the issues raised by these questions is a complicated one, deserving far more attention than I can give it here. It is my goal, however, not to exhaust this topic but to stimulate further discussion of it, so my hope is that the exemplars will provoke such exploration. (30)

The overall message of the article is very consequentialist, something akin to Porter’s work in Meaning, Language, and Time. Meaning changes with time, various audiences, and even what cultural or emotional baggage individual audience members bring with them to each site; moreover, all of this can be affected by the material conditions of the memorial site on the day of the visit. Time is not panchronic nor is a rhetorical act static. In turn, this means rhetoricians must see rhetoric as more than production by a single rhetor, and moreover, that the rhetorical effects of a text go beyond the rhetor’s intended (and limited) goals. Rhetoricians must conceptualize how rhetoric changes and is diffused throughout a given rhetorical ecosystem.

Haas, Christina. “Materializing Public and Private: The Spatialization of Conceptual Categories in Discourses of Abortion.”Rhetorical Bodies. Eds. Jack Selzer and Sharon Crowley. Madison, WI: The U of Wisconsin P, 1999. 218-238. Print.

In this essay, Haas uses a grounded theory approach (or GTA, described in full on page 221) to articulate (a la Greene) the rhetorical and discursive connections between the Permanent Injunction posted on a clinic’s doors; the US Supreme Court; the work of Hannah Arendt, Jurgen Habermas, and Nancy Fraser; and the transformation of an abstract concept–privacy–into a physical, spacial reality affecting the lives of staff, patients, and protesters. According to Haas, the specific case at Womens’ Choice Services demonstrates “the distinction between public and private in spatial terms works not only in theory but also in practice. It is a truism in many humanistic disciplines that ‘discourse constructs reality,’ but seldom can such construction be taken so literally: the text of the Schenk ruling establishes that ‘privacy’ (in some circumstances, at least) is a literal, actual, material space at least fifteen feet wide”(232)(by the way, through this the spatial metaphors deployed by Arendt, Habermas, and Fraser are seen to be more material than poetic).

Section dealing with Arendt, Habermas, and Fraser 225-229.

The root metaphor for conceptualizing public and private in the work of these three very different theorists is space-not process, or force, or commodity, or any of the other ways that this distinction might be conceived of, but space. The public is a space, a sphere, an arena; the private is a realm, a zone, an area. In sharply delineating public and private spaces, the “author” of the Permanent Injunction invokes a metaphor that, however complex and fraught it may be, has a great deal of cultural currency. And, just as Arendt, Habermas, and Fraser acknowledge the historical and empirical reality of various public spaces, the Permanent Injunction “works” by specifically delineating actual spaces for public activities (protest) and private activities (inside the clinic, on the sidewalks approaching the clinic, in workers’ homes). (229)

Privacy defined in this case as the right to reproductive freedom-has been legally established not just conceptually and metaphorically, but literally and materially. “Privacy” is a space at least fifteen feet wide, but less than three hundred; its shape is a rectangular area in front of clinic entrances, not a bubble around individual persons. (232)

The Supreme Court rulings, understood in broad historical context, lend credence to Bryan Turner’s claim that under circumstances of great political anxiety and confusion, there arises a cultural obsession with the material and the bodily (2-6). (232)

The desire of an individual to be “let alone” is strongly tied to the embodied, spatially oriented existence of that individual-an existence that, though indisputable, is extremely difficult to articulate. Elaine Scarry, in The Body in Pain, suggests that “the relative ease or difficulty with which any given phenomenon can be verbally represented influences the ease or difficulty with which that phenomenon comes to be politically represented” (12; emphasis in original). It may be that the increasing literalization of the spatial metaphor and the increasing materialization of privacy are reactions to the Court’s difficulties in verbally and politically representing this important but elusive right. (233)

Like any conceptual construct, the public/private dyad oversimplifies. And, like other common dichotomies, it can be and has been used to perpetuate or enforce insidious political distinctions. (233)

For Greene materialist rhetorics often try to account for the representational politics of symbolic communication, and in doing so he sees two distinct types of materialist rhetorics. The first follows the logic of influence model, meaning these materialists “focus on how the interests, often understood as a will to power, of a speaker are hidden, distorted or revealed by that speaker’s rhetorical choices” and emphasize “rhetoric’s role as a form of persuasion” (38). The second follows the constitutive model of rhetorical effectivity, meaning these materialists focus “on how the text functions to politically and aesthetically fignre the process of subjectivity” and emphasize “rhetoric as a form of identification” (38). Green’s version of materialist rhetoric (hence the title of the article) eschews this binary by offering up a logic of articulation as “a way to to map the multidimensional effectivity of rhetoric as a technology of deliberation” (39).The advantage of this logic of articulation over a logic of representation is:

a materialist rhetoric…that… replaces a hermeneutics of suspicion with a form of cartography that does not reduce the materiality of rhetorical practices to the interests of a “ruling class” at the same time as it maintains the irreducible difference between rhetoric and other material elements (technologies of power, production and the self in the creation of a governing apparatus. A materialist rhetoric built on the logics of articulation avoids positioning the historical forces of capitalism, white supremacy and/or patriarchy as the deep structure(s) of a governing apparatus but instead maps how they are transformed, displaced, deployed and/or challenged by a particular governing apparatus. In other words, the “macro-structures of power” exist less as hidden interests to be uncovered than as technologies distributed, activated and programmed by rhetorical practices for the purpose of policing a population. (39)

Greene also explains what he feels are the shortcomings of McGee’s fragmentation thesis (covered in McGee’s “Text, Context, and the Fragmentation of Culture,” which I read but did not post notes on) at various times throughout “Another…”, yet his most cogent criticism can be found on page 37:

McGee’s attempt to focus on fragments instead of texts does not escape these different models of rhetorical effectivity [mentioned above] as much as it ties both to a metonymic theory of representation that identifies a homology between the forms of rhetorical practices and culture writ large.

Overall, Greene’s model appears (to me at least) to combine Perleman’s ideas about rhetoric as probabilistic reasoning and Latour’s version of ANT.

McGee defines ideographs as having these characteristics:

An ideograph is an ordinary language term found in political discourse. It is a high-order abstraction representing collective commitment to a particular but equivocal and ill-defined normative goal. It warrants the use of power, excuses behavior and belief which might otherwise be perceived as eccentric or antisocial, and guides behavior and belief into channels easily recognized by a community as acceptable and laudable. Ideographs such as “slavery” and “tyranny,” however, may guide behavior and belief negatively by branding unacceptable behavior. And many ideographs (“liberty,” for example) have a nonideographic usage, as in the sentence, “Since I resigned my position, I am at liberty to accept your offer.” Ideographs are culture-bound, though some terms are used in different signification across cultures. (15)

McGee finds the ideograph an important concept since he believes they do away with the poetic element of symbolists rhetoricians’ (McGee counts Burke, Dewey, and Cassirer among these symbolists) constructs, yet, simultaneously, explain the truth about power and ideology undergirding these symbolists constructs. Metaphors like “‘[r]hetoric,’ ‘sociodrama,’ ‘myth,’ ‘fantasy vision,’ and ‘political scenario’… [and] their links with the trick-of-mind that deludes individuals into believing that they ‘think’ with/for/through/ a social organism” (15) are made tangible and traceable when defined and treated as ideographs. McGee explains the work of the symbolists is important because it focuses on the “media of consciousness, on the discourse that articulates and propagates common beliefs” (15), and thus, the ideograph makes the truth of symbolists constructs visible through framing them as a “legitimate social reality” accepted by, and propagated through, individuals using a “vocabulary of complex, high-order abstractions that refer to and invoke a sense of ‘the people” (15). By learning the political ideographs that are diffuse and circulate through a given society, McGee claims it’s possible to understand how people are dominated by ideology/hegemony, saying “By learning the meaning of ideographs, I have argued, everyone in society, even the ‘freest’ of us, those who control the state, seem predisposed to structured mass responses. Such terms as ‘liberty,’ in other words, constitute by our very use of them in political discourse an ideology that governs or ‘dominates’ our consciousness. In practice, therefore ideology is a political language composed of slogan-like terms signifying collective commitment” (15).

I have argued here that the ideology of a community is established by the usage of such terms in specifically rhetorical discourse, for such usages constitute excuses for specific beliefs and behaviors made by those who executed the history of which they were a part. The ideographs used in rhetorical discourse seem structured in two ways: In isolation, each ideograph has a history, an etymology, such that current meanings of the term are linked to past usages of it diachronically. The diachronic structure of an ideograph establishes the parameters, the category, of its meaning. All ideographs taken together, I suggest, are thought at any specific “moment” to be consonant, related one to another in such a way as
to produce unity of commitment in a particular historical context. Each ideograph is thus connected to all others as brain cells are llinked by synapses, synchronically in one context at one specific moment.

A complete description of an ideology, I have suggested, will consist of (1) the isolation of a society’s ideographs, (2) the exposure and analysis of the diachronic structure of every ideograph, and (3) characterization of synchronic relationships among all the ideographs in a particular context. Such a description, I believe, would yield a theoretical framework with which to describe interpenetrating material and symbolic environments: Insofar as we can explain the diachronic and synchronic tensions among ideographs, I suggest, we can also explain the tension between any “given” human environment (“objective reality”) and any “projected” environments (“symbolic”or “social reality”) latent in rhetorical discourse. (16)

This seems to be situated within a very top-down, hierarchical situation as described in Marxist theory–even the way McGee describes the political sphere as a distinct space with its own set of discourses. How would this work within the confines of a counterpublics paradigm?

Villanueva, Victor. “Hegemony: From an Organically Grown Intellectual.” Pre/Text: A Journal of Rhetorical Theory 13.1-2 (1992): 17-34. Print.

Faigley, Lester. “The New Left Times.” Pre/Text: A Journal of Rhetorical Theory 13.1-2 (1992): 38-56. Print.

Hulbert, Mark C. and Michael Blitz. “The Institution(‘s) Lives!” Pre/Text: A Journal of Rhetorical Theory 13.1-2 (1992):60-75.

Berlin, James and John Trimbur. “Introduction.” Pre/Text: A Journal of Rhetorical Theory 13.1-2 (1992): 7-15. Print.

In this introduction, Berlin and Trimbur explain the lack of a Marxist rhetoric. Citing the American fear of all things Marx (think the Red Scare, the cold war, cold war liberalism, McCarthyism) Berlin and Trimbur claim the discipline has no Marxist rhetoric since it came of age when discussing such a philosophical foundation was verboten. This issue, therefore, is a deemed a “progress report that unevenly and sometimes stutteringly seeks to articulate some of the determinants of what might become a fully developed position–Gramsci, feminism, British cultural studies, institutional critiques, American radicalism, the New Times’ Post-Fordism, radical pedagogy, working-class academics” (7). As an attempt to unify such a broad corpus of texts, Trimbur and Berlin describe the contributors to this issue as public teachers/intellectuals, and then situate these public teachers/intellectuals within the project of Gramsci’s organic intellectuals. These intellectuals are “of the working class” who must be “‘permanent persuader[s]‘” who speak “for the workers and to the workers, articulating their interests and encouraging their rise to economic and political control in word and action” (Berlin and Trimbur 11, Gramsci qtd in Berlin and Trimbur 11). After explaining Gramsci’s concept of dual supersturcutre and hegemony, Berlin and Trimbur assert within this overarching ideological framework (which subsumes, I figure, the articles by the individual contributors) that the

rhetoric teacher’s fucntion as an intellectual speaking for the new order of the currently dispossessed, while situated within the structural position of the traditional intellectual, is thus to foreground for critique the rhetorical devies of hegemonic discourse in order to offer an alternative rhetoric, one that speaks for an emancipatory counter hegemony. The conduct of the battle for social hegemony–the effort to win consent through signification by dominant subaltern groups–becomes the special proviince of the instructor of rhetoric. The teacher described in the follwoing essays, then, also describes gramsci’s “active participation in pracitcla life, as constructor, organizer, ‘permanent persuader,’ presenting the teacher as activist continually rltaing the materials of the classroom to the struggle of the larger social setting…to assess realistically the kind of political action possible today and to pursue it with due intensity. (12)

Questions to be discussed at a later date:
Using Gramsci seems to be a move towards a cultural materialist form of material rhetorics, not a historical materialist form. Does a historical materialist form of material rhetorics automatically preclude a discussion of race, gender, sex, and ethnicity? Does it mean an exercise in–for lack of a better term–vulgar Marxism? Can a material rhetorical analysis informed by historical materialism be nuanced?

Quotable quote

The right’s gloating over the victory of the free market and democracy (democracy, of course, here equated with the freedom to exploit and the corresponding freedom to choose new and improved useless commodities) has been linked to an attack on the university’s turn to “political correctness.” This opprobrious designation has been attached to any political position the right has found contrary to its own, democracy being constructed as the freedom to think and say whatever the right wants us to think and say. Any other thought and expression is attacked as capitulation to the intellectual police of the academy. At least these attacks are correct about one thing: many university intellectuals are fed up with the economic and social havoc resulting from two reactionary presidential administrations, and some of them are returning to what remains the most powerful analysis of the horrors of capitalism ever written. Indeed, an increasing number of professors are, as in this collection, making the classroom one center of their political response to a time shameful in its treatment of women, children, minorities, workers, the poor, the uninsured ill, the elderly, and almost anyone else who has not joined the top two percent of the population in wealth. The trickle down spout has become curiously clogged. All of this is to say that no matter how loudly the death of Marxism is proclaimed in the popular press, capitalism’s unmitigated cruelties and fear of the truth will keep the critical spirit of Marx alive. (15)

Villanueva, Victor. “Hegemony: From an Organically Grown Intellectual.” Pre/Text: A Journal of Rhetorical Theory 13.1-2 (1992): 17-34. Print.

Villanueva’s article not only echoes Berlin and Trimbur’s introduction, but Villanueva also, literally, plays out the role of their idealized rhetoric teacher. Villanueva uses the space of the essay to explain Gramsci’s theories on traditional, organic, and new intellectuals, Gramsci’s ideas about the best type of classroom (30), and then explains how he (Villanueva) deploys both in concepts in his classroom. The major claim of the essay is social change comes through challenging and changing the dominant hegemony. The classroom is the space for Gramsci’s war of position, that is, the space to challenge and change the dominant hegemony through the creation of a counter-hegemony. Villanueva’s method involves teaching the dominant’s literacy practices, the teaching of dominant’s version of history, and then critiquing both by juxtaposing these texts and accounts from texts and accounts composed by subaltern writers. For my purposes (noting and understanding the differences between historical materialism and cultural materialism), this appears to be a materialist critique based on cultural materialism. The primary focus is on texts, language, and pedagogy.

The usual definition: hegemony equals ideological domination. Gramsci adds an essential qualifier: domination by consent. Without consent, hegemony fails. fro the most part, consent is granted ideologically. Ideology is not necessarily imposed from the top down, however. Ideology is not ascribed. As Gramsci sees it, every culture contains particualr world views, ideologies; some of these are common to the cultures within a society and are common to the cultures that comprise the dominant groups. We accept commonly held world views as truths. The dominant does more than accdpt; it capitalizes on the generally accepted truths. We accept the dominant’s actions as based on truths; we approve of acts based on truths; we consent. (20)

The settler’s dominant religion’s work ethic would support capitalism: shoulder to the wheel, a penny saved is a penny earned, waste not want not, self discipline, thrift, hard work. Liberal politics, with its emphasis on individualism and laissez faire economics, transmitted through the pulpit, the press, town hall meetings, would further serve capitalists. (22)

Scientific Marxism in Gramsci’s time believed that conditions would arise which would precipitate the forceful inculcation of change: the economy crashes; the workers revolt. But Gramsci had seen economic crashes without subsequent revolutions. No “natural” evolution toward revolution. Although Gramsci would not discount armed conflict, a “war of maneuver,” he saw armed conflict as secondary, to be preceded by a long “war of position,” a counter-hegemony… a war of position is waged rhetorically. (22,23)

Whatever the contradictions, whateer the current economy, there is momvement withing and through the classes; there is still affluence for many and the hope for affluence in many more. America has a special talent for revolution restoratin, able to keep hope alive. (23)

In other words, an organic strategy within a war of position seeks t bring about a new hegemony. For Gramsci, this means forming a new “historical bloc.” An historic bloc is formed when a war of position has been so successful that changes are sought and brought into effect throughout the cultural, politcal, and economic sectors of society. A new consensus is formed–a new hegemony. consent, the key to hegemony, had to have been gained through careful articulation and negotiation throughout the social system. New terms, or new definitions for existing terms, agreeable to all, had to have been developed. “Socialized medicine” becomes “national health insurance,” for instance. The war of position underlies Frier’s hope, that in changing the word we would change the world. An historic bloc, formed by a war of position, in order to bring about anew hegemony is, then, brought about by persuasive articulatory practice. Hegemony is rhetorical. (23-24)

Traditional intellectuals, even those who are conscious of class relations, are subject to a “directive hegemony,” an element of hegemony which seeks to control. Gramsci describes two ways in which a directive hegemony operates over intellectuals. One way is through an insistence on specialization. Intellectuals are enjoined to have “an activity of their own in their technical field,” keeping them tightly focused on minutiae, keeping them from contemplating the “ensemble of relations” (Notebooks 104). (25)

Faigley, Lester. “The New Left Times.” Pre/Text: A Journal of Rhetorical Theory 13.1-2 (1992): 38-56. Print.

In this article Faigley describes how using a “New Times” theoretical lens (named after the publication founded by Stuart Hall, which articulated this post-Marxist analysis of the 1980s political scene) not only explains how the Left in the US and Britain failed to rally against Reaganism and Thatcherism, but also how to make sense of the “micropolitics” springing up (keep in mind this was written in 1992) around social issues and taking the place of traditional party politics.

The “New Times” project was one of the first indications that Left theorists see the need for drastic rethinking. the “New Times” project itself is an acknowledgement that Marxism doe snot hold the answers. It abandoned the Lefts traditional disdain for consumption, and it drew on earlier feminist analyses to reinterpret consumption as a potential site for resistance. It recognized that part of the attraction of consumerism is the potential of release from identities constructed in binary oppositions…The larger project of those who still identify with the Left demands coming to terms with how political identities formed and what relationships those identities have to people’s lives. (54)

Third, a New Times analysis views the shift to the Right in the United States as well as in other Western nations during the 1980s as a shift away from traditional politics parties instead of a shift away from one party to another. The waning of loyalty to national parties has produced a void to be filled by numerous micropolitcal movements that proliferated in the 1970s and 1980s…a more explicit appeal to decentered, postmodern politics was Jesse Jackson’s 1988 “Rainbow Coalition.” Jackson was the first progressive candidate to abandon the notion of a center to which various groups could be drawn and to make heterogeneity the organizing principle. (51,52)

Could be useful as a touchstone piece, ie, when the shift from party politics to politics from below began.

Hulbert, Mark C. and Michael Blitz. “The Institution(‘s) Lives!” Pre/Text: A Journal of Rhetorical Theory 13.1-2 (1992):60-75.

In this article Hulbert and Blitz use Kenneth Burke’s concept of dramatism as a framework to explain how the academy shapes the material reality of the academics, staff, and students who work and study there. Their best claim:

In their role as custodians of knowledge, academic institutions are autopoietic–they make themselves and maintain themselves through an ability to make whatever is not in the instant themselves, into a part of themselves. Chilean theoretical biologists Humberto R Maturana and Francisco J. Varela propose that autopoiesis can be understood as ontology requiring no goal other than its own continuity. The autopoietic or living sysmem is, strictly speaking, a homeostat. It is intrinsically conservative, continually adjusting to maintain itself, continually incorporating that/those which would disrupt it. When “perturbated,” the organism is at once prompted to secure and to recognize the disturbance as already a feature of itself. It is always a t once making itself and receiving itself, and proceeding in its own scene, transforming that which is not itself into itself. (65-66, emphasis original)

In a very historical material turn, Hulbert and Blitz claim:

If we are to understand a system, we must study the various roles it plays in larger systems. In this sense, we see the university fulfilling two purposes. It proposes, at the very least, to be a scene of independent, liberal, “free,” and critical thought; at the same time, it services the state, promoting state models for political positions, ideologies, missions, and even, financial plannings and (mis)managements. But the academic institution also “organizes” the state. As it produces model citizens to serve the needs of the state, the university also helps to produce the kind of state that requires–indeed needs–these citizens, the production of which is one of the institution’s chief services. (66)

Wolff, Jonathan. Ed. Edward N. Zalta. “Karl Marx.” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Summer 2011 Edition. Stanford U, 14 Jun 2010. Web. 10 May 2011.

Schell, Eileen. “Materializing the Material as a Progressive Research Method and Methodology,” forthcoming.

Berendzen, J.C. Ed. Edward N. Zalta.”Max Horkheimer.” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Stanford U, 24 Jun. 2009. Web. 10 May 2011.

Wolff, Jonathan. Ed. Edward N. Zalta. “Karl Marx.” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Summer 2011 Edition. Stanford U, 14 Jun 2010. Web. 10 May 2011. forthcoming URL

2.2
Furthermore, it makes clear that the solution to these problems is to be found in the formation of a more rational social order, which is described in terms of a socialist planned economy. This point, then, provides the space where Horkheimer can link his own materialist theory, and the work of the Institute, to the broadly Marxian aim of emancipation through overcoming the capitalist order. Because “the wretchedness of our own time is connected with the structure of society” (1933b, 24) a social theory that could make that structure’s irrationality explicit could help overcome that wretchedness. Furthermore, that irrationality needs to be made explicit to the classes who suffer the most from it, so they can take proper action. So Horkheimer’s view connects generally to the Marxian view of the proletariat as a critical force in history, but unlike (on certain interpretations, at least) Marx, he does not see history as necessarily moving the proletariat to “critical consciousness” because of the irrationality inherent in capitalist socio-economic arrangements. Rather, various social and economic forces keep the proletariat from recognizing its potential; for example there is a split between the unemployed, who suffer most from capitalism but are disorganized, and the workers who can be organized, but fear losing their jobs (Horkheimer 1934a, 61–65). The proletariat requires the help of the theorist. That theorist must engage in a special kind of activity, however, which (as the next section will show) must steer clear of two opposing errors. (Berendzen)

So if in historical materialism if history is a force unto itself, causing societies to “rise and fall as they further and then impede the development of human productive power” with Marx seeing “the historical process as proceeding through a necessary series of modes of production, characterized by class struggle, culminating in communism” (Wolff), then is cultural materialism the concept alluded in the above paragraph where the “proletariat requires the help of the theorist” to move to critical consciousness? In this sense, is theorist writ large so as to mean the product of cultural institutions like the academy to make communism a reality?

Schell, Eileen. “Materializing the Material as a Progressive Research Method and Methodology,” forthcoming.

Schell’s essay describes the differences between cultural materialism and historical materialism, how both have been used (even in a hybrid form) in rhetoric, composition, and literacy studies, and why the difference matters (historical materialism focuses on issues of socio-economic class, race, gender and ethnicity as they are lived meaning a more ethnographic, sociological approach; cultural materialism can do the same things but tends to make its unit of study language, discourse, and/or suasive artifacts). What I find most compelling is her conclusion, which I quote at length below.

Conclusion: Materializing the Material: Why it Matters
The inquiry questions I offer below are meant to help scholars find ways to materialize the material more concretely and specifically in their work. I offer these up in the spirit of mutual exchange and inquiry, not as a template.

• How am I defining the concept of the material? Is my treatment of the material tied specifically to historical materialism as Marx would describe it? To cultural materialism as Adorno and Horkheimer would name it? Or more specifically to a notion of materialism tied to feminist conceptions of embodiment, to the body, and corporeality, and to lived experience? What are the discourses and theoretical frames that are fueling my analyses—what are their origins, histories, and how does my analysis account for those?
• Am I concerned mostly with artifacts and objects in material culture, choosing to focus more on the idea of material as a concrete concept, as matter in the world? If so, is the notion of an artifact or object tied to particular power relations, class structures, and racialized and gendered hierarchies? Who has access, who does not, and why?
• Why does an analysis of the material matter? Why is materialist analysis called for at this particular moment? Why does it matter? Whose interests does it serve? What “blind spots” do I have about examining the concept of the material and materiality?
• How can I interrogate my own position with respect to materiality? How is my own material position accounted for in the project? In what ways will my own self-reflexivity and ethical position be named or addressed—or not– as part of this project?
• What research methods would best serve a material analysis? If we are truly addressing the material, does that necessitate more qualitative approaches such as ethnographic studies and interviews? Our tendency as a field has been to gravitate toward the textual, the printed word or the transcribed speech or classroom practice or consideration of historical rhetorics. How does material analysis enable us to look more specifically at specific cultural, institutional, and economic structures and artifacts in very concrete and specific ways? And how does material analysis allow us to engage digital processes and production?
•Finally, how do I connect my conceptualization and theorization of the material with actual economic and material conditions, movements, groups, and organizations in the world whom are struggling to change conditions of exploitation and oppression? How can I think beyond the scope of my discipline/field and particular rhetorical situation to think more broadly about interconnected economic, social, and political structures in national as well as transnational ways?

With our desire to bring materiality to rhetoric, composition, and literacy studies must come the responsibility of deploying materiality with an awareness of what it means to purport to do material analysis and to lay claim to what historical and theoretical traditions we are drawing upon. Certainly, the material matters in our field, but what is at the base of material and materialist research in our field and why it matters are questions worth interrogating. (23-25)

Coogan claims a materialist rhetoric applied to service learning provides the rhetorical means to make “changes in institutional practices” affecting community-based organizations (CBOs) instead of the oft chased after “changes in public discourse,” literally, the mundane “publicity of effect of rhetoric” (672). This is built on the idea that the public advocacy most service learning/community literacy courses promote and hope to accomplish does not, contrary to current belief, “begin with the principles of good argument…but with an analysis of those historical and material conditions that have made some arguments more viable than others” (668). This means a applying a materialist critique to the various communities/CBOs a service learning class works with. The appeal of service learning for Coogan is, consequently, two-fold. It’s not “just a case for rhetorical activism in service learning” but also “a case for rhetorical scholarship in the public sphere: a challenge to test the limits of rhetorical theory in the laboratory of community-cased writing projects in to generate new questions for rhetorical theory, rhetorical practice, and rhetorical education” (670). Coogan continues on to explain that “in this light, [service learning] offers rhetoricians a unique opportunity to discover the arguments that already exist in the communities we wish to serve; analyse, the effectiveness of those arguments; collaboratively produce viable alternatives, with community partners, and asses the impact of interventions” (668). Specifically, this method is built on the analysis of the ideograph. Coogan explains:

while they appear to express the speaker’s intentions in an original way, they in fact “represent in condensed form the normative, collective commitments of the members of a public, and they typically appear in public argumentation as the necessary motivations or justifications for action performed in the name of the public” (xii-xiii). Ideographs are not full arguments, then, but ideological icebergs: the visible bump of what lies beneath. To analyze an ideograph is to take the ideological pulse of the community. In ordinary times, McGee explains, ideographs “remain essentially unchanged” (“the Ideograph” 431) and become “definitive of the society we have inherited” (430). ” but when we engage ideological argument, when we cause ideographs to do work explaining, justifying, or guiding policy in specific situations, the relationship of ideographs changes” (434). What once were reliable signposts on the road of public discourse become blurry symbols of dissensus. Disagreements about an ideograph are not discrepancies over its formal properties but its formative power to contain our commitments, “as when awareness of racism” at mid-century raised “contradiction between [the ideographs of ] property and “right to life” in public debate over open housing. (670-671)

The overall goal is to make change through using these analyses to perform rhetoric, not just compose criticisms of past rhetorical actions, moments of decontextualized consciousness raising, or the creation of deliberative bodies consisting of community activists and university students/faculty. The idea is to teach and make material change through linking the identification of ideographs, narratives, and characterizations to “techniques of rhetoric to techniques of power” to make material change through enabling people “under-served communities to ‘use language and literacy to challenge and alter the circumstances of daily life’ (12)” (Coogan, Cushman qtd in Coogan 690). Overall, this article appears to be a call to make changes in communities by accomplishing specific, tactical goals set by either CBOs or individual community members.

Horner, Bruce. Terms of Work for Composition: A Materialist Critique. Albany, NY: SUNY P, 2000. Print.

Introduction

In this section Horner explains the benefits of a cultural materialist critique over a traditional historical materialist critique, the purpose of the book, and provides a summary/goals of each chapter in the book (each chapter is focused on one term, so chapter one is focused on the term “students”; Chapter two “politics”; chapter three “academic”; chapter four “traditional”; and chapter five “writing”).

For my purposes the most important aspect of the intro is his discussion of cultural materialist critique versus a traditional historical materialist critique. Horner explains:

Raymond Williams concept of the materiality of culture forms the basis for my argument as a whole. In keeping with that concept, my use of the term “materiality” conforms to the Marxist tradition of historical materialism, in which the mode of production is understood to include social relations as a significant “productive force” (see Marx and Engels, German Ideology 18). In a critique of how base-superstructure relations, productive forces, and art have been conceptualized in Marxist thought, Williams observes that the error in such conceptualizations resides not in materialism but in a failure to be materialist enough (Marxism 92). For example, the view of the work of art as reflecting material concerns suppresses “the actual work on material–in a final sense, the material process–which is the making of any art work” (Marxism 97). As a result of that suppression, the work of art–and, by extension, intellectual work generally–is separated from the material social conditions of its production, and so imagined as, at most, acting autonomously on, against, or in spite of but not with and within such conditions. The material means of such work are elided, as re the processes of its distribution and consumption, the interaction of these in its production, and the social relations enabling and constraining it. (xvii, emphasis mine)

Paraphrasing Giddens, Horner makes the case the use of structural determinist and individualist methodologies often “remove structures from their instantiation in time, eliding their material historicity” (xix), consequently over-exaggerating or foreclosing the possibility of agency on the part of individuals as well as imagining goth agency and structure becoming construed as “discrete and opposed rather than material, historical, and interdependent” (xix). Horner continues on to explain that Giddens’ theory of the duality of structure serves as an important piece to this book since it “addresses this by recognizing the interdependence of agency and structure and their location in time. This enables us to identify the limited effectivity, and so the potential for changes to, and within, both agency and structure. From this perspective, work is the occasion for both reproducing and revising material social relations” (xix).

Through insisting on the tracing out of the materiality of social relations, Horner claims a materialist critique stops him from making large, wholesale, unsophisticated leaps about what student writing or developments within composition mean. Such jumps (see his example on xx about a hypothetical student’s paper and the postmodern condition), Horner explains, “constitute a throwback to mechanical ‘reflection’ models of the relation of base to superstructure against which cultural materialist arguments are posed” (xx). Drawing on Bordieu’s conceptualization of economic, social, cultural, and symbolic capital and the production of and conditions of exchange between various forms of these within and between different sociocultural sites, Horner is able to “identify delimitations in the kind and degree of significance to be attached to specific practices while recognizing the socially and historically contingent nature of those delimitations” (xx).

Using a material critique based on such foundations, the overall goal of this work is to acknowledge the power of existing material conditions om composition, how those conditions shape the work done in composition, and the historicity of those conditions–so as to point out “their susceptibility to changing consciousness and action” (xvi).

Chapter One: Work

Using the methodology described above, Horner explains that the cultural significance of work in composition can only be changed by the locating of said work in its historical and material relations. Horner’s prime example of steps in the right direction is the February, 1996 CCC issue discussing the re-articulation/revamping of “basic” writing. Horner claims what these articles do best is “they challenge the distinction between intellectual labor–whether conducted in the classroom or in the scholar’s study–and the material conditions of that labor, and so undermine the boundaries distinguishing “one’s own” work, the work of and for the institution, and the work of students…we must abandon such distinctions, in effect making it our work to articulate the interpenetration of all these as constitutive of our work” (28,29). Through understanding the “contradictions embedded in distinctions between intellectual and non-intellectual labor and the commodification of intellectual labor play out at the site of composition” (29), and again returning to the claims found in the introduction, is it possible to change Composition studies. Essentially, only by understanding Composition as a convergence of forces (or a node in a larger network, the network designated as the American academy) is it possible to untangle those affective connections and create realistic, actionable change.

The distinction between intellectual and non-intellectual work persists, however, because of the class interests it serves. For the distinction designates some labor, and so some laborers, ‘higher” than others by reason of the ostensibly greater intellectuality of their work, deserving of both greater status and rewards. Indeed, within this discourse, to designate academics as “laborers,” or even “workers,’ seems counterintuitive, suspect, or perverse, for it implies a link between those officially distinguished as intellectuals and others that the distinction is intended to obscure…my point in highlighting tis link, however, is not to encourage an anti-intellectualism, to propose eliminating the category of “intellectual,” or to overlook the material differences between those designated intellectual and those not..The materialist approach to intellectuality I am advocating would insist on the material specificity and historicity of the kind of mental and material work involved in and intellectual practice… Rather than denigrating or praising what passes for intellectual work for its intellectuality, we need to insist on the material social conditions making that work possible and shaping it; we cannot use its “intellectuality” as a basis for denying its materiality. (8,9)

This torsion is felt particularly by humanities faculty, thrown into crisis, Guillory argues, not because of the “politicization” of the humanities but because of their increasingly marginal role as instruments of ideological reproduction. There is, he observes, “a certain inverse relation between the organic significance of sectors of intellectual labor to the process of production [of the socioeconomic system] and the measure of work autonomy (and thus potential intellectual autonomy) granted to those sectors” (128)…What now places the humanities in serious crisis, according to Guillory, is the declining value of their cultural capital. While earlier humanities were responsible for producing and maintaining a useful (to the dominant socio-economic order) ideological distinction between bourgeois and lower classes, that distinction is now effected not through that status hierarchy but through the ideology of “productivity” and “upward mobility” (134-35). (13)

While unionizing has foregrounded the material needs of teachers, it has largely assented to commodification of the labor of education, neglecting the full sense of the work of education as a complex material social process involving the specific conditions, needs, desires, and actions of students and communities. In the commodification, work comes to be seen only as labor enacted on behalf of institutions, through teachers on students to the dominant’s specifications, aimed at the production of abstract “skills” or “abilities.” In this commodification of teaching labor, what is produced in teaching is abstracted from the contingencies of what teachers, students, and material and historical conditions contribute to that work. (25)