Postmodernism | Paper #3 | Prof. Bay | November 16, 2017
“What am I doing in this field?” (Haynes, 61) “What am I doing in this field?” (Me, Dec. 2014, San Francisco, CA). It was during the last few weeks of my philosophy MA program that I was suddenly jarred by this question. I loved (and still love) the field of philosophy, but I suddenly had a hard time explaining why I was still in that field. Too logocentric, yes. Too homogenous, both culturally and ideologically, yes. Job market prospects too harrowing, yes. So I sat, listened, worked, uttered out to rhetoric, waited, rhetoric echoed back, and then I stepped off-shore.
Haynes contends that contemporary writing pedagogy has been stuck between the bondage of argumentative reasoning on one side and the expansive capacity of unfettered writing on the other. She marshals this perspective by relying on the imagery of a stable shoreline (philosophy) and the fluid sea (rhetoric free from reason). According to her, the problem is that composition pedagogy is forced to stay “too close to the shoreline, dragging the anchor of argumentative writing (aka critical thinking),” to the extent that it has, “run ashore” (61). In no uncertain terms, Haynes states that she is “dissatisfied with teaching writing that is primarily argumentative writing qua reason,” and that the entire field of composition pedagogy has become “rotten with reason” (62). Yes, in this era of institutional accountability and assessment, the paradigm of critical thinking frames most college writing programs. Sure, this limits the kinds of conversations, assignments, and evaluative feedback we can offer our students. Compositionists and rhetoricians are “stuck between a (practical) rock and a (theoretical) hard place” (86). So in response, Haynes offers an alternative of “writing offshore” which “suggests a mixed reality” based on movements through space, suggestively made by “nonsovereign outposts” along the way (63). In this sense, writing off-shore can be understood and unbound by the so-called sovereignty of argumentation, and in flux across space/time and in interacting with ideas. The means of “casting off” from our current anchored encumbrance is what Haynes calls, “abstraction,” or a kind of pull or draw, or maneuvering that gets us “to draw away from the shoreline of philosophical reason and its alluring beacon of argumentation (64). Been there, done that, and now I’m doing this.
The strongest (dare I say) critical points that Haynes levels against argument-based writing pedagogy are that, “students are taught as if they are nascent teachers,” which many of us are, but most of our students are not, and that “thinking should not be judged by a standard that does not measure up to it” (66 & 73). Our students who plan to become future managers, engineers, and agriculturalists probably should not be evaluated as if they are teachers in the waiting. But if we cast off and start abstracting our way to peripatetically teach writing off shore, what does that make us and our students? Haynes thinks off-shore writers are “in a word, refugees” (86). Off shore practitioners become “refugees of reason,” who seek “abstract asylum” (87-88). This image of maneuverable-floating-off-shore melds nicely with Nail’s description of the figure(s) of migrants in fluid mechanical terms.
According to Nail, refugees are a subset of the figure of the barbarian (135). He conceptualizes their migration as two-fold: once while enslaved and subordinated within their homelands, and again as they leave it in search of refuge. Ironically, the movements of this figure align closely with the slave revolt (136). The wave function for this figure draws attention to the diversity among refugees and slaves in revolt, in contrast to the uniformity of bordered and divided society. But unlike slaves in revolt, refugees have a (potential) safe place, a refugium. They are also (potentially) protected by the construct of asylum, or the “politically sanctioned place where one has the right to not be seized or captured” (135). Writing and teaching offshore is a new navigable space for me, so I wonder I could actually step off the terra firma of logic/argument/reasons, where would I be drifting?
Argumentation is, by definition, adversarial and aggressive. In seeking asylum from this, I wonder how floating off-shore is like stepping into an airplane, or de facto city, established for the purposes of extrajudicial interrogation (Haynes126-137). While the refugium protected by asylum is a safe place to be free from aggression, the extrajudicial sites described by Haynes are aggressive places absent of physical and psychological safety for detainees. Both spaces are defined by the special kind of protection they provide, one is free from persecution, the other is free from prosecution. Enhanced interrogation only ‘works” if the atrocities it commits remain beyond the reach of law. In some sense, back room waterboarding is just a way of maneuvering offshore, minus a few constraints of ethical decency. To counter the prospect of wrongdoers hijacking rhetoric, Haynes abstracts a refined model of “post-conflict pedagogy which starts from the position of the sound listener” (143). Listening, rather than speaking, becomes the foundational strategy for teaching and writing in a world where rhetoric is all too often abused as an instrument for evil. Haynes’ stated aim here is, “to destabilize the stabilizing momentum of any pedagogy that reiterates conflict in the name of writing” (141). When listeners receive combative rhetoric, they capture the audio, then scramble the waves before sending them back using critical audacity—the essential action here is “composing a hearing,” or learning to write as listeners, not speakers (143). Critical audacity is really both about being bold and audacious when it’s critically needed, but it’s also attuning one’s listening (audio-ability) with critical attention. Yes. I <3 this. Echolocation can also be used to amplify the softest voices of the most skilled listeners.
Haynes segues into her chapter on torture by entertaining the idea of asking the reader to, “put your hands behind your back and clasp your wrists and hold that position throughout your reading,” because she doesn’t wat to see our dirty hands that we use to write, grade student writing, and “sign the ledgers of literacy that litter this country” (127). I began this paper by asking you to accept my paper (heart) because I decided to share my message with you on the condition that once you accept the paper (heart), it becomes yours, and the only way to see its contents is to open your paper (heart). Opening is a kind of listening. Few symbols are more richly and diversely connoted than the heart, and I intentionally omitted referring to the heart in my paper on transplantation, given how “touchey” it is. So, in Haynes’ style, here’s my little Heart Riff.
While the heart is often thought of as symbolizing passion, emotion, and love (particularly the irrational romantic variety), this aren’t the only associations. Many religions associate the heart as the locus of purity, guilt, or conscience. Ancient Egyptians saw the heart as a component of a person’s soul and the piece responsible for emotion, thought, will, and intention—it was the part that was weighed on the scales of justice after death to determine one’s fate. In Japan, one word for heart, kokoro, is a concept that unifies mind-heart-spirit in a way such that it describes a person’s overall wellbeing. Deep memory and knowledge: “I know it by heart.” Sincerity: “from the bottom of my heart.” The heart is associated with knowledge and wisdom just as much as with love and emotion. As a metaphor, we speak of “getting to the heart of the matter” as means of identifying the central point. In the popular Western culture (at least as far back as Plato’s Republic), the distinction drawn between heart and brain is somehow made out to stand in for passion/emotion and knowledge/rationality. We feel the heart in a way that we don’t feel the brain. It beats. It pulses. It breaks. There’s a physical materiality to the heart and an ideal non-materiality associated with logic and the brain. But I’m not convinced of this binary. As Gary Snyder says, “wisdom without compassion feels no pain” (Buddhism and the Coming Revolution). Hayne’s suggests abstraction (a kind of pulling out) as a way of maneuvering through writing and away from reason. As a corollary, I might suggest com-passion (a kind of going-in-fully-with) as a rhetorical strategy that allows us to insist on maintaining the heart’s knowledge in the space of argumentation.
Haynes’ relies on a metaphor that I think might be illuminated by a distinction in approaches to com-passion. In discussing abstraction, Haynes evokes on the image of the shoreline, the ocean, anchors, and casting off in boats. Her image of leaving a shore of bondage is the same as the “little raft” and “big raft” allegory used to describe Mahayana and Theraveda Buddhism. In simple terms, Buddhist philosophies teach that liberation or enlightenment is possible as a way of ending suffering. The little raft approach (Theravada) looks to the model of the Arahant, or solitary practitioner, who works hard and achieves enlightenment for them-self in a single lifetime. They only need a little raft to cross to the other shore. The big raft approach (Mahayana) looks to the model of the Bodhisatva, who believes that they cannot cross to the other shore unless all other sentient being are able to come with them. Hence, they need a big raft (com-passion). In considering how rhetoricians should engage with hijacked rhetorical messages like the video of Daniel Pearl’s execution, Haynes abstracts, “rhetoric’s responsibility is ‘to take absolute responsibility for itself’ rather than to absolve itself ‘for’ the world” (137). This strikes me as sensible, but I’d also like to think there’s some middle ground between rhetoric being responsible for itself and absolving itself for all others. Maybe there are some points where com-passion might allow us to engage with others?
Anzaldúa tells us, “wild tongues can’t be tamed, they can only be cut out” (54). Like the heart, the tongue is a muscle. Fortunately, the heart is different from the tongue. Even the sassiest tongue can stand still (if even for a moment), as long as we will it to. The heart, on the other hand, is an involuntary muscle. We don’t move it, it moves itself, and it moves us. Some say freedom is marching to the beat of your own drummer. My drummer beats inside my chest. For me, the secret to marching well isn’t simply following your own drummer, it’s also about remembering to look up and around to notice who else is walking with you, not because they are following you, but because your drummers happen to be playing in concert.
