Response+Paper+2

Some passages from Grimm and Boquet that produced questions:

 * "Postmodernism often strikes fear into the hearts of people who have been favored within institutions" (Grimm 118)** -- this seemed an odd statement to me, as my experience has led me to believe that the people who have most strongly embraced postmodernism are those who have been most favored by the institution. Or, at least those who have embraced postmodernism in theory. Grimm seems to claim that postmodernism requires us to give more consideration to subjects that have previously been excluded, to the Other voice, to rethinking the positions that have insisted on the 'rightness' of the current academic model. But I'm not sure all her binaries make sense.


 * "According to this distinction between domination and oppression, it can be said that if writing centers fail to acknowledge the culturally specific and arbitrary nature of academic expectations, they are complicit in institutional oppression" (Grimm 104)** I'm not sure what my question was here, but I marked it out as a question.... let me think on it a bit.


 * "Writing center workers will need to think of themselves as scholars and researchers if they are going to undertake tasks like these [working with students to intervene in disempowering representations and to find opportunities for students to offer more complicated self representations]" (Grimm 91).** This is an interesting claim considering that in community literacy work (and I'm thinking specifically in Ellen Cushman's work and that modeled after hers), the idea of approaching the work as a researcher or a scholar is often the first step to ruining the interaction and, to use Grimm's words, being "complicit in institutional oppression." What are the elements of the scholar or researcher that Grimm finds so productive? How do we negotiate that with the claims/assumptions from community literacy work? What are the differences and distinctions between these positions?


 * "According to Butler, the subject 'deriv[es] its agency from precisely the power it opposes, as awkward and embarrassing as such a formulation might be, especially for those who believe that complicity and ambivalence could be roted out once and for all (Grimm 71)**... contrast to "postmodernists offer a fluid conception of identity, one that acknowledges the social processes of subjectivity..." Claiming that agency comes from opposition takes a reactive stance (as per our convo last week), yet Butler (and through her citation, Grimm) is claiming that this is a more fluid identity. Yet it seems very rigid in that it is always set by that which needs to be opposed. Again, seeming to come from a binary position of complacency and opposition. Yet I find most provocative in Grimm's work where she discusses the triangular nature of relationships and the need for that third voice. Boquet picks this up as well, insisting that if we are to change the institution we must become aware of the third party in the dialogue, pick up on the noise which was previously only static. So how does this fit into the claim that agency comes from the power it opposes. I can tell that she doesn't see it as binary or finite, so I'm curious how she's reading this. Also, this seems to conflate identity and subjectivity in interesting ways... something else that would be good to talk about.


 * "These moments are not replicable. They are simply happenings" (Boquet 52)**. I can dig on the un-replicability in terms of opposing the scientific replicability requirements. It's not knowledge unless it can be reproduce and all that. But if nothing is replicable and everything is simply a 'happening,' then how does that allow for hope?


 * "Davis writes, 'It is not in the work, it is in the 'unworking' that community is exposed, not in the pulling together but in the brrrreaking up... Pulling together doesn't produce community, but crrrackiong up exposes it'" (Boquet 143).** I can see how breaking up can produce community in terms of breaking up assumptions, or regulations, and allowing for excess, but it's hard for me to accept that pulling together doesn't produce community. Perhaps it lies in the forcedness of the community that Boquet is examining. A forced pulling together is rarely ever a pulling together at all. And I'm a little unsure about the link between the idea of 'exposing' community and 'producing' community. And it seems to be a bit of a narrow sense of community that is being worked with here. Perhaps new understandings of community would challenge these assumptions? I'm not sure I understand quite where Boquet, or Grimm for that matter, stands on the idea of 'community.'


 * "If tutoring were infectious, we might argue, writing center work would have revolutionized the teaching of writing by now... If tutoring were infectious, we wouldn't still see 'Go to the writing center!' penned at the bottom of an essay" (Boquet 21).** I highlight this passage merely in connection to Grimm's idea that the writing center's rejection of the remedial student (an idea that Boquet later touches upon in her book) is actually part of the WC's contribution to institutional oppression. Not only does the university want to get rid of them, put them away so that they do not have to be associated with them, but so do we through our claims that the WC is for everyone, not just remedial writers.

Key or interesting ideas presented within Grimm and Boquet that caught my attention:

 * "What would happen if we were to seize that designation, admit that the writing center is indeed a place where actual labor (gasp!) takes place, look our colleagues in the eyes and say, yes, we work with our hands" (Boquet 18).** This struck me because it reminded me of the octalog, when they start debating the difference between historians who sit in their chairs and theorize and historians who get their hands dirty. Then, of course, that gets challenged because those who claimed to "work with their hands" meant going through dusty archives, which can be a way to sanitize against the problems of the world because they only things that are often recorded and saved and then sorted into understandable archives are artifacts that represent a mainstream view. That digging into archives doesn't require the messy work of thinking about alternative subjectivities. This is especially true given Charles Morris' arguments about the normalizing forces of archiving, requiring the 'burden of proof' to rest on the non-normative position. So, I find it interesting when Boquet makes the claim that WC workers "work with their hands," wearing this as a badge of honor, when in fact it is probably a badge that every person in the university tries to claim for themselves.


 * We "may be more interested in the cleanly //appearance// of student texts than in the genuine condition of the texts and the ideas they re/present" (B 22).** How true. I think that this stems clearly from our desire to represent //ourselves// well to the university. It becomes quite narcissistic actually. Like the "value-added research" that Boquet discusses, we worry about how the center is presented to the rest of the university, and it is presented through the medium of student texts more than any other. In fact, value-added research is probably our way to take even more control over those student texts by re-representing them via statistics. Perhaps that is why: **"Though we hold out hope that the typical calls for more research in/form the writing center should change (perceptions, funding, status for faculty), somehow they seem not to have the desired effect. Instead, they threaten to merely reduplicate the noise of the institution. Like the closed feedback loop... such value-added research may serve simply to return the noise back to the institution, unchanged" (B 47).** And unchanged because it is not actually student centered, but merely appears to be student centered. And given the current economic crisis, I'm sure value-added research is flourishing.


 * "Such a monstrosity exceeds expectations for the 'normal' and the excess, for those of us who work in writing centers, is potentially a way in/out/around the central/marginal/community quagmire we've been stuck in for too long. the question of whether our practices are central to the work of our universities is closely aligned with the degree to which those practices adhere to institutional expectations. The degree of our marginality, in contrast, corresponds to the extent to which we fail to adhere to those expectations (and the extent to which our institutions fail us)" (B 32)... "I am inclined to believe instead that our writing centers grow out of institutions that continually outgrow themselves. And we have to hope for some monstrosities along the way. Maybe even tweak the helix a bit here and there to ensure them" (B 33)**. This, of course, struck me because it is so implicitly rooted in queer theory, with claims of the normal and the monstrous and failure. It might be interesting to examine this quote through the lens of Judith Halberstam's work on failure as a productive framework.


 * "Tales of writing centers are invariably tales of location, of space. They involve a privileging of the gaze" (B 36).** I'm not sure I would have connected the writing center's focus on space as a privileging of the gaze. This has a lot of implications about power and authority that would be worth playing out.


 * "When we concern ourselves with how to transmit information from sender to receiver in the most efficient manner, with the least possible distortion - with, in other words, the least amount of noise - we are constructing a theory of dialogue that depends upon the exclusion of a third party, whose contributions are dismissed as mere static in the system, whose mere presence is deemed unsanitary" (B 51).** Link this to the work that Grimm does with Family Systems theory and triangular relationships.


 * "The writing center is not mine to (dis)own. I find myself having to renegotiate this relationship I thought I had with my center, with my tutors, with my colleagues. An identity in crisis" (B 59).** Again, focusing on control and management. Was this an inspiration for your identity theft article?


 * "Noise asks us to consider how and where the writing center echoes throughout the institution" (B 60).** Echoing from the WC suggests a reversal of the direction that we often think of control being exerted. Rather than asking how the WC perpetuates the tones of the university, B is questioning the echoes of the WC's noise into the larger institution. And, as per our conversation last week, I'm inclined to ask about the echoes beyond the university as well.


 * "What institutions didn't bargain for, though, is that housing these student populations as such might result not always or even necessarily in containment but in amplification, in reverberation, might actually turn up the volume on the kinds of demands that students make on institutions of higher learning and might send institutional dictates and mandates screeching and squealing back to their source" (B 67).** Very true. The production of social movements tends to come from an overexertion of control towards particular populations.


 * "...I am surprised by the Taylorized mechanization of even my own language: the production and management of community, the figuring-out and the working-toward. I hadn't quite let go. I suppose we can't fully let go. But I believe now, and I have seen at RIC, that '[c]ommunity is not a product; it cannot be built or produced. One experiences community' (Davis 196)" (B 143).** This goes along with my earlier questions about community.


 * "Thus, the increased diversity of students in higher education is avoided twice - first by universities establishing programs like writing centers that distance faculty from students; and second by writing centers' distancing themselves from a remedial function" (Grimm 10).** I loved this. We rarely think of the impact on students that these types of statements make, focusing instead on the marginalized position of the wc itself. But now Grimm asks us to find the possibilities in that position, perhaps making a challenge that is not binary opposition, but more fundamentally revolutionary than that. Instead of just reacting and saying, "no, that's not us," to question what it means that we have been labeled in that way and how we can proactively use that position toward our own ends and democratic means.


 * "Within a postmodern framework, we can articulate the value of the writing center according to how well it contributes to institutional performance by increasing the spaces for listening; how much it contributes to understanding of difference; how often it creates participant roles for students; and how frequently and effectively it offers opportunities for faculty to understand the mental models that students bring to college" (Grimm 25).** A statement of new values (rather than administrative values, such as retention or GPA).


 * "To locate literacy problems in cultural constructions, we must abandon positions of innocence guaranteed by the literacy myth and come to terms with the political implications of writing center work" (G 29). ... "If writing center workers respond in ways that focus attention on the rapid cultural changes under way rather than on unskilled or undeveloped individuals, we provide a map for repositioning. Because literacy is not culturally neutral, even though many pretend it is, changes in literacy involve changes in our understandings of identity, politics, and relationships" (G 45).** The rejection of innocence would also be interesting to examine through a queer perspective. Also, this quote brings up the negotiation between being student centered and the focus away from the individual and onto cultural changes.


 * "My aim is to move writing center practice in the direction of a literacy of the contact zone by focusing on the conceptual stumbling blocks to that move, particularly the social pressures that keep the academic identity kit intact. I don't intend to rescue agency and identity from postmodern challenges but to move further into them and reckon with the realization that literacy learning is often far from the liberating experience that we like to imagine" (G 56).** I'm not sure I'm a fan of the "contact zone" like I used to be, as I've seen it used too often with a complicity that Grimm is clearly critiquing here. Contact zones are overly idealized and rarely take into account the material conditions of the situation. So I'm curious what Grimm means here by a literacy of the contact zone.


 * "As Marilyn Cooper has observed, it is really quite irrational to believe that in matching the specifications of the assignment, students are learning to exercise agency in writing or take ownership of texts" (G 56).** Yes, we often believe this. That being "rhetorically savvy" enough to write to an assignment means that students now have the power to own their texts. yet, having the ability to write to an assignment doesn't in any way give someone the power to write for themselves, or to write in a way that challenges a mainstream mode/voice/value.


 * "Pretending that we are on 'the other side of discourse' in the writing center or affirming that we are doing the right thing by justifying our practices according to the way things are 'in the real world' are only ways of denying the psychic effects of social regulation" (71). ... "Morgan could not see, play with, tolerate, appreciate, or imagine Fannie's point of view because she saw it from the point of view of the university, the institution - from the universal gaze of regulation. From this perspective, the problem appears to reside in Fannie; Fannie needs to remake herself" (G 78).** Goes back to the "getting our hands dirty" discussion from earlier. In order to rethink, we've got to consider our own implications, get ourselves in the thick of things. Not as the institution that is above critique, or the caring and communal writing center that has gotten past the problems and is now 'on the other side' (read: the right side, the progressive and positive side), but rather as a site whose own privilege to blame others is part of the oppression.


 * "Rather, I am recommending that they tell students how these authoritative practices work without automatically and unconsciously endorsing them. I am recomending that they de-naturalize the practices so that students can make decisions about the extent to which they want to conform to the design, to acknowledge the norm encoded in the design, and even depart from it or create a new design" (G 79).** This is a pretty succint statement of Grimm's practical application of her theory/critique. Not yet sure quite how I feel about this.

Grimm suggests the ideas of Laclau and Mouffe over Gramsci because **"Gramsci linked his hopes for social change to a contest between essentialist social categories, such as class divisions" (92)**. Whereas **"Laclau and Mouffe argue that the possibility for a deeper democracy exists in an acceptance of the radically open nature of the political terrain, the multiplicity of viewpoints in circulation. They recommend not a a contestatory political practice, not a hopeful holdout for a revolutionary event, but an ongoing effort to articulate multiple discourses in the direction of greater democratic practices" (93).** This gives me some cause for question.... while I can understand the idea of not "holding out" for the revolution (because then we may be waiting forever), we've also seen, especially in the last decade, that condemning those who hold out for the revolution actually leads to extremely conservative practices.


 * "To function as agents of change in higher education, to work toward a fair practice, writing center workers must understand how systems function, how language influences the construction of Self and Other, how literacy works as cultural and social practice, how political action produces social change" (Grimm 110).** What does Grimm consider political action?


 * "If tutors are encouraged to assume a peer relationship, they risk engaging in a similar projection, representing students as similar to themselves. ... Because we are ontologically unable to think or feel from another's perspective, a fair writing center practice should be characterized by what Young calls wonder, a wonder that motivates a desire to hear the Other's stories. Wonder is a humble stance of openness to the mystery of another" (112). ... "Learning to see one's perspective as perspective is more likely to happpen if writing centers are staffed by people from diverse majors and diverse backgrounds. the common practice of hiring English and education majors is not likely to produce this mix. Nor is the practice of screening applicants for their high GPAs" (G 114).** Suggests her take on the "who should tutor" question. Brings it back not to how do we find tutors who are qualified to "help" students with their papers, but rather who can bring a unique perspective to the writing center, who can best help the writing center fulfill a mission of working with difference. Demonstrates how the earlier responses to that question approached it from a singular view of the writing center, one that was ideologically aligned with the institutional position.


 * "Rather, I hope that [this book] is read as an invitation to reconsider the work of writing centers in higher education, to imagine a practice where social justice replaces pale versions of fairness" (G 120).** This sounds really nice, but again, there is little articulation of what social justice might mean, and especially little discussion of the implications that taking up a position of social justice will entail. So I'm curious exactly what Grimm implies by this. How does she see the connection between postmodern positioning and working from "wonder" and social justice (which i often hear referenced quite differently than I think Grimm seems to imply)?


 * Having read these two pieces, I'm thinking that perhaps I should frame my exam around writing center work for social justice?