"Clifford Geertz on Writing and Rhetoric" (response essay)

The JAC interview with Clifford Geertz provides elegant confirmation—if anyone needed it—of the reasons why this “closet rhetorician’s” work has drawn the attention of many in composition studies. Geertz, along with such scholars as Donald McCloskey (The Rhetoric of Economics), James Boyd White (Heracles’ Bow: Essays on the Rhetoric and Poetics of Law), and Dominick LaCapra (History and Criticism), has helped catalyze what has been variously called the “rhetorical turn,” the “turn to interpretation,” or the “epistemological revolution” in the social sciences. Geertz has helped map the changes that postmodern life and thought have entailed. Essays like “The Way We Think Now” and “Blurred Genres: The Refiguration of Social Thought” have functioned for many as intellectual signposts, enabling scholars in a variety of fields to make provisional sense of the intellectual ferment surrounding them.

Composition and Pluralism

Geertz is an articulate scholar whose work transcends the boundaries of his own discipline; he is also a self-conscious stylist who has reflected for some time about what it means to be a writer, an author. Thus, not surprisingly, there is much in this interview to interest compositionists. Geertz’s description of his own composing process, for example, stands as a striking reminder of the way in which our field’s writing-as-process-not-product “revolution” has too often hardened into a repressive orthodoxy. If Geertz enrolled in a freshman composition course today, would his teacher insist that this “essentially one draft” composer couldn’t possibly write an effective essay unless he revised numerous times? And would Geertz—who describes himself as writing “from the beginning to the end, and when it’s finished it’s done”—be forced to manufacture messy-looking freewrites and rough drafts to please his composition teacher, as some students now do?

Geertz is a forceful advocate of the usefulness of ethnographic research; this interview includes a number of comments directly applicable to those conducting such research in composition studies. Unlike many scholars, particularly social scientists, Geertz is also acutely aware of the extent to which a project like After the Fact, his current effort “to think about how I function[ed] as an anthropologist in a certain time,” is as Geertz says “a writing task” (emphasis added). What more elegant affirmation could those engaged in writing-across-the-curriculum efforts ask for? And Geertz’s reasoned and reasonable comments on multiple literacies, on the futility of trying “to construct some kind of high old tradition” to which all students must submit, are certainly heartening. It is reassuring to know that this internationally-known scholar working at the prestigious Institute for Advanced Studies is “against the Allan Bloomean sort of business.”

Geertz sees a number of similarities between anthropology and composition studies. Both are relatively new disciplines; both are inherently interdisciplinary; and in both there is at times “a great deal of anxiety” over what the field is. Describing himself as an “inveterate fox,” Geertz suggests that scholars in composition studies should not become dismayed over our field’s seeming chaos. Instead, we should “try everything,” avoid “premature closure on anything.” This advice appeals to my own pluralistic sensibilities. But there’s pluralism—and then there’s pluralism. Pluralism can encourage healthy diversity and conflict; the resulting “atmosphere of debate” can, Geertz observes, “make for a vital and alive field.” However, pluralism can also be a dodge; it can leave important questions not just unanswered but unasked.

Geertz comments, for instance, that even in a pluralistic discipline scholars must be “somewhat critical and not just do any silly thing.” This sounds quite genial and commonsensical, but how do we finally determine in specific cases what comprises a reasonable versus a “silly” (or possibly even dangerous) research effort? And to what extent might the apparent openness and flexibility of pluralism mask strongly entrenched intellectual, emotional, and political commitments? Geertz himself notes that if scholars in composition believe that certain things are “vital,” they therefore “need to support them.” How do we determine whether scholars are reasonably and appropriately supporting their beliefs through professional argument or whether they are attempting “to fasten some sort of hegemony onto things”? Conversations in JAC, recent letters in the “Comment and Response” column of College English, and well-publicized arguments over the proposed freshman composition curriculum at the University of Texas at Austin indicate that there can be considerable disagreement over questions such as these.

So I find myself both attracted to and suspicious of Geertz’s call for pluralism and for reconciliation between the humanistic and social science research models currently contending for dominance in many fields, including composition studies. Like Geertz, I don’t like to think that scholars in the humanities and social sciences “don’t have anything to say to each other or offer each other.” But how do scholars with strongly divergent assumptions and methodologies forge a synthesis without resulting in “one big mishmash”? And does pluralism automatically ensure diversity and conflict, as Geertz seems to suggest? Couldn’t it also mask the agreement to disagree politely, rather than to confront differences?

I have no answer to these questions; I simply want to point out that Geertz’s genial, liberal approach may have the limitations of, well, genial liberal approaches. The questions that Geertz has clearly given much thought to—whether fields like anthropology and composition studies can be too diverse, the benefits and dangers of pluralism—are questions that we must continue to ask. We must also recognize that terms like “pluralism” themselves require critical scrutiny, lest we rely upon commonsensical (and hence unexamined) understandings of their meaning.

It was Geertz who first taught me to look with particular attention at that which seems most commonsensical, most obvious. It is there, Geertz notes in “Common Sense as a Cultural System,” that we can often see how a culture or discipline “is jointed and put together,” that we can discover assumptions so strongly held and so broadly shared that they remain unstated and thus uncontested (Local Knowledge 93). Reading Geertz’s essay helped Andrea Lunsford and me realize, for instance, that it is hardly an accident that English teachers have assumed single authorship to be the norm. Rather, English teachers, like others in the humanities, have long held the pervasive commonsensical assumption that writing (particularly “real” or belletristic writing) is inherently and necessarily a solitary, individual act. Once we recognized the power that this largely unexamined assumption held for teachers of writing, we realized that our study of collaborative writing, Singular Texts/Plural Authors: Perspectives on Collaborative Writing, needed to examine the concept of authorship itself. It is no accident that Clifford Geertz is mentioned in the first paragraph of our study.

Precisely because it is so obvious, the wisdom of common sense can be hard to recognize, much less analyze. “There is something,” Geertz comments in “Common Sense as a Cultural System,” “of the purloined-letter effect in common sense; it lies so artlessly before our eyes it is almost impossible to see” (92). As I worked on this response, I found myself wondering if there might be one or more purloined-letters hiding in plain sight in Geertz’s interview that might productively be analyzed. I would like to devote the rest of this response to one such potential purloined letter: Geertz’s conflation of “rhetorical analysis” and “literary criticism.”

Geertz’s Conception of Rhetoric

Despite his fondness for and understanding of Kenneth Burke, Geertz’s rhetoric seems grounded in the conservative tradition of technical rhetoric. In identifying rhetoric with literary criticism, in assuming that rhetorical analysis involves the New Critical close reading of texts, Geertz implicitly characterizes rhetoric primarily as formalistic analysis. Geertz asks many sophisticated questions about the relationship of authors and texts—questions that certainly need to be asked by those in the social sciences who have looked to science, not the humanities, for models and methods. But in exploring the factors that “make discourse particularly persuasive,” Geertz focuses on such traditional concerns as “how composition occurs, how the text is constructed, how the argument is developed, and why it is or isn’t persuasive.”

These concerns are part of rhetoric’s domain, but rhetoric—and certainly rhetoric as it is evolving in response to poststructuralist critical theory—involves more than traditional textual analysis. A number of theorists have drawn on rhetoric’s emphasis upon and grounding in the rhetorical situation to argue that rhetoric can provide a means of analyzing the textual production of identities and of social relations. This view of rhetoric is articulated by Terry Eagleton, who closes his well-known Literary Theory: An Introduction by calling for a return to rhetoric, which he characterizes as follows:

Rhetoric in its major phase was neither a “humanism,” concerned in some intuitive way with people’s experience of language, nor a “formalism,” preoccupied simply with analyzing linguistic devices. It looked at such devices in terms of concrete performance . . . It saw speaking and writing not merely as textual objects, to be aesthetically contemplated or endlessly deconstructed, but as forms of activity inseparable from the wide social relations between writers and readers, Orators and audiences, and as largely unintelligible outside the social purposes and conditions in which they were embedded. (206)

Rhetoric, as articulated by Eagleton and others, is concerned with and provides opportunities to explore the contingencies of history and ideology. Thus characterized, rhetoric goes beyond purely textual matters such as “how the text is constructed, how the argument is developed, and why it is or isn’t persuasive” to consider the interplay of culture, politics, and ideology in the production and legitimation of texts.

Geertz’s description of his current project ,After the Fact, indicates that he recognizes the importance of reflecting on issues such as these. In attempting to look back on his previous studies in order to “describe the work I’ve been doing with myself in the picture,” Geertz potentially at least is moving from an exclusive focus on the relationship of authors and texts to an examination of the anthropologist’s rhetorical situation. In order to examine “the ideological framework” under which he operated from the 1950s to the 1970s, Geertz may need to go beyond a concern for “reflexivity” in order to address the larger questions of the nature of the subject and the relationship of the text to the historically, politically, and ideologically contingent world in which it is situated. The fact that Geertz has found postmodern discussions of “problems of representation and of the relation of power in representation” to be “issues that we can no longer pass off” bodes well for his inquiry. I, for one, am looking forward to the publication of After the Fact, knowing that, as always, I can anticipate not only a good read by a sophisticated and witty stylist but also a challenging exploration of “The Way We [or at least one thoughtful, articulate anthropologist] Think Now.”

Oregon State University
Corvallis, Oregon

Works Cited

Eagleton, Terry. Literary Theory: An Introduction. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1983.

Geertz, Clifford. Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology. New York: Basic Books, 1983.

—. Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1988.

JAC Volume 12 Issue 1