JAC Volume 14 Issue 1

Lester Faigley and other teachers of writing have contributed to the discussions of postmodernism. At least some aspect of this movement, to each of its students, revokes illusions and promises hope. In addition, writing teachers are in position to contribute to other academic subjects and perhaps to change them. Lester Faigley's treatise explores the formulations and implications of "postmodernist theory," takes up its terms, discourse, usages, and cadences with enthusiasm. He tries to make postmodern theories exchange thoughts with rhetoric, composition, writing, and literacy studies. For those who haven't yet entertained what it could mean for these two zones of effort to engage one another, this book will help.

For me, however, this book is frustrating because it does not relate the conjunction of writing and postmodernism to the urgent needs of today's academy. While the book may well be enjoyed by those who have no problem with the jargon of today's literary theory, it was hard for me to detect in it concern with the issues of collectivity now affecting schools and classrooms across the country, or enough sympathy for the new populations of students that are about to become majorities in school and society. Faigley may have such awarenesses and sympathies, but this text does not show them. Rather it speaks mainly to other cognoscenti, others who claim special knowledge of difficult, troubled texts and language. I think that if concern for practical collective issues doesn't appear in a serious treatise such as this, then something is wrong with academic ways; Faigley seems uncritically to accept these ways and its terms and its rules, and in consequence has produced a book which finally offers little critique of the subject of writing and only topical attention to the teaching of writing, though there are critiques of other things. This is disappointing, though not surprising.

At the heart of this study is the author's acceptance of postmodern terms as if they were themselves "transparent" and not in need of reading. Putting the term "postmodern" aside as in some sense acceptable, the main problem term is "subject." Those of us who enjoy playing ith words have had our go with "subject," "subjectivity," "subject matter," "subject position," and so on. Like Susan Miller and others, Faigley has come upon the interesting thought that the word for person and the word for discipline may be this contested term, subject. For Faigley, not too much follows from this perception, but here is what he actually says in his last chapter, "The Ethical Subject," which could be fruitfully read as an introduction to the book, or just read by itself. (The reader may appreciate that Faigley has so many announcements of what he was doing before and what he is doing now, and what he will soon be doing, that it is not possible to get lost in this treatise. On the other hand, do we really need so many road signs?)

First, I think it should be said that the term "subjectivity" as used in contemporary discussions of theory means only something like "the state of being a subject." This is not the meaning I take, which is the activity of one's mental life, what happens inside of one's head, so to speak. Most people I have met who use the term as Faigley does rarely acknowledge the earlier sense (used repeatedly over many years by Husserl, for example) of the term and, thus, do not teach us why this new usage came to pass at all.

One reason the new usage arose may be loosely ascribed to "postmodernism," but more accurately ascribed to the French operation on Freud, which treated his works as primarily a collection of texts rather than, ironically, and as advised by Derrida, to see the texts as only a "trace" of the actual work Freud did on living people. The French academic appropriation of Freud severed his contribution from the living and historical circumstances of its production. In a strange and self-indulgent way, in fact, the team of French intellectuals, the most urgent of whom was Lacan, claimed Freud's texts, embalmed them, and made them available for routine autopsies by anyone wishing to do the job. The French operation on Freud was reckless and is to be contrasted strongly with the American feminist critique of Freud (Dinnerstein, Chodorow), which studiously retained the human situation, presupposed by most professional psychoanalytic writings, of help for those interested in individual and social amelioration.

The textualizaton of subjectivity has drained from it its necessary implication of feeling, of interpersonal relationship, and of living connection between individual mental life and social organization, an issue raised in modern terms as long ago as 1949 by Erik Erikson in Childhood and Society. Of course, Erikson and psychosocial teacher-scholars like him are not "postmodern"; they are only "modern." But because of the often-unthinking embrace of postmodern vocabulary, Erikson's almost isolated attention to this "postmodern" question of how a single person is both an "agent" and a "creature" cannot be understood as a point of reference. Erikson "descended into ethnographic detail" before Geertz did. It is Erikson and some anthropologists, like Margaret Mead, who actually introduced discussions of the so-called subject into the study of society and politics. My point is not to show origins, however. It is only to say that those, like Faigley, who express frustration over the "impasse" of postmodernism and the agency of the subject have actually taken these topics out of their modern history. The resulting discussions therefore appear myopic and jargon-bound.

In the passage cited above, Faigley says that the problem of the "instability of the subject" is the crux of the impasse. Can anyone claim that in the modern period works of subjectivity that included those of Henry James, Dorothy Richardson, Virginia Woolf, and James Joyce portrayed a "stable" subject that used language as a "transparent" medium? These early modern writers are the ones who, with Freud and Husserl, introduced the questions of subjectivity as we now know them. Furthermore, the activity of verbal (or "talk") psychotherapy helped to make subjectivity into intersubjectivity and into a collectively recognized experience in the contemporary sense. By contrast, the ideas of "destabilization" and "disruption" were introduced by French textualization of Freud's work. Academics, still functioning enthusiastically under the Platonic and Cartesian assumptions of the severance of ideas from experience, combined the idea of the destabilization of language and meaning with the loss of sovereignty of the Freudian ego and came up with the awkward thought that the self has been destabilized.

This last sentence is the crux of my response to Faigley's book. In part by virtue of its "postmodern" style, in part by virtue of its invocation of paradox, in part by virtue of its lack of interest in feminist thought, in part because of its unhesitating advocacy of the electronic juggernaut, Faigley's discussion is, from my perspective, of possible interest mainly to those who are just starting to familiarize themselves with postmodernism. Lacking a philosophy of difference grounded in a sense of social justice, and unable to read politically the lived experiences of his students, Faigley, like J. Hillis Miller in his forthcoming interview in Journal of Advanced Composition, falls back on ethics as the solution to the purely academic question of how to locate the subject. Traditional individualist ethics' failure as an approach to social justice has produced today's political challenges to begin with. In the last paragraph of the book, Faigley says what this new ethics might be: "Bringing ethics into rhetoric is not a matter of collapsing diversity into universal truth. Neither is ethics only a matter of radical questioning of what aspires to be regarded as truth. Lyotard insists that ethics is also the obligation of rhetoric. It is accepting the responsibility for judgment. It is a pausing to reflect on the limits of understanding. It is respect for diversity and unassimilated otherness. It is finding the spaces to listen." I don't know. I don't see where any of these formulations is any different from the ethics I learned under individualism and androcentrism. In theory, in other words, Faigley presents no new senses of the integration of ethics.

However, he presents material from classrooms, and his discussion of the "networked" classroom gives a better taste of the practical struggle in which Faigley is involved as a teacher. With regard to this aspect of the book, it will be helpful to many of us, regardless of our response to Faigley's approach to theory. It is clear that the networked electronic classroom produces new sorts of texts, a kind of private/public or public/private combination that previously could be found only in cliques characteristic of adolescent social life. The conversations of these cliques now are classroom performances, since they acquire a level of thoughtfulness and abstraction we don't normally expect in clique-talk. On the other hand, each person's thought is brief, and, more consequentially, transient. In the book, the conversations are textualized and thus available for Faigley and for us to think them over and consider what they say or point us toward. However, Faigley does not take this path, nor does he consider how this new pedagogical scene affects individual students and their thinking: rather, he wonders whether a certain consumerism has set in: "Topics are introduced and consumed according to what students like at that moment and what they don't like." This thought leads, in turn, to the thesis element of the book: "Networked writing displaces the modernist conception of writing as hard work aimed at producing an enduring object." Well, yes, this seems true enough, but what about it? This is where Faigley and the book grinds to a halt into the abstractions about ethics. Here is what Faigley says:

What is both strange and frustrating about this conclusion is that all Faigley can conclude is that deeper theorizing is now needed. At the same time, he cites his interesting texts only as evidence of postmodernism, as if there were no choices in just how the electronic medium can be used. As Marion Fey reports in her essay in this issue of the Journal of Advanced Composition, the electronic medium has the means to help some people build newly integrated selves: selves based on new political awarenesses. These selves are important just because they are stable. And the electronic exchanges discussed by Fey, not unlike the exchanges cited by Faigley, were actually instruments which helped previously disempowered people to build new stable selves on new political grounds.

While Faigley's arguments are not strident, they are narrow, devoted mostly to theory, and not too much to the moments of human action and development that the students' essays suggest. Faigley's own classroom citations throughout the book do show the "richness of the classroom." But there is no reason for him not to have recognized this already, and not to explore just how his own interactions with his own students may help them "rewrite" their narratives in new terms.

The problem I see in this book is probably not unique to Faigley. There are many thoughtful teachers like himself who don't know, practically, what teaching students to rewrite their narratives may mean. It is clear that Faigley understands that one cannot simply instruct students in such a rewriting. At the same time, it is clear that we teachers cannot wait for the revolution to teach us how to teach our students. So Faigley's solution of more theorizing, while plausible, is simply wrongheaded. It is at this point that Faigley's failure to take feminist thought more seriously has reduced the helpfulness of his study. Of course, feminist thought comes in many varieties, but most of it leads us to the reconsideration of the lived experience of students and teachers. It considers students texts to be already integrated into students lives, as opposed to evidence for larger abstract movements in history and society. Many feminists, like Faigley, have challenged, even following Freud, the concept of "his majesty, the ego." Yet this challenge is moving not toward the concept of the fragmented self, but toward a combinatorial self, a self that actually has stability and unity, but one that changes with one's changes of personal, social, and political relationships. Faigley may be locked into the "either-or" style of thinking if he continues to believe that the end of the monolithic self leads to some "impasse" in postmodern theory, some crisis of "agency." In fact, the sense of the combined self--a self which retains parts of one's past self, parts of the other selves in one's life, as well as hopes for one's future self--has been a release for some people already because it enlarges and loosens the old, fixed self with new opportunities for flexibility and change. I think Faigley would not have had to struggle so with "ethics" had he perhaps tried to conceptualize and include in his thinking the philosophy and psychology of the emerging feminist pedagogies.

These pedagogies have led to more genders in society as well as more genres in writing classes. Faigley actually uses some of these new genres as examples, and they make stimulating reading. But less stimulating is the use of these genres as evidence for the fragmented subject. The new genres and the styles of thought they augur might be seen more helpfully as instances of fresh individual and collective exploration, which I think they are. The theoretical forms are already available for Faigley to have read the student work in less doctrinaire ways. But the book seems so carried away by the academic winds of postmodern vocabulary, that the ground of teaching on which he is himself standing is barely visible.