JAC Volume 15 Issue 1

In his introduction to JAC’s interview with J. Hillis Miller, Gary Olson writes that "Hillis Miller has always been interested in rhetoric and composition, even though in the past he hasn't always seemed to understand what we in the field do." Perhaps the most useful way of beginning my task as respondent is to comment on Olson's characterization (I agree) and to say whether in this interview Miller demonstrates a different, and somehow more accurate, understanding of "what we in the field do" than the one that informs his earlier writings.

Prior to this interview, Miller's crucial statements had been "Composition and Decomposition: Deconstruction and the Teaching of Writing," and "The Function of Rhetorical Study at the Present Time," both reprinted in Theory Now and Then. In both essays, Miller seemed (perhaps strategically, so as to discriminate compositionists’ construction of "writing" from his own account of "reading") to understand research in composition as exclusively empirical. "It founds itself," he wrote, "on the most advanced twentieth century scientific or quasi-scientific discoveries about the nature of language and the nature of composition, the processes whereby writing is generated and revised... " (227). In composition research as he construed it, “The emphasis can be happily on praxis as opposed to theoria. Such theory as there is is immediately testable in praxis” (228). To gather the grounds for this claim, Miller "examined" a collection of composition handbooks (by Elaine Maimon, Susan Miller, Joe Trimmer, Sheridan Baker, Robert Scholes and Nancy Comley) and concluded that composition studies failed to observe that all language is figurative.

What I found problematic then (see my "For Its Own Sake") was the way in which Miller's language constructed composition, and compositionists, as other. The word nature, and the undeconstructed theory/praxis binarism (unusual articulations for an author closely associated with deconstruction) implied that compositionists held essentialist notions of writing. Many of us, for important political reasons, did (and still do) deny the opposition between theory and praxis, or have worked to blur it, but that is not what Miller said. Instead, he formulated the procedures of composition studies in the most reductive terms of empirical science. Further, he seemed to claim that compositionists understood and attended only to the communicative function of language. Let me try, by analogy, to explain how these characterizations were problematic.

"Naming" and the Service Function

In this interview Miller speaks of the "myth" of the Yale School as "a product of people ... who needed a name" for the men whose thinking and writing and teaching had "a certain role in representing the theoretical side of the faculties" in New Haven during the 1970s and 80s. To describe them as "the Yale School"' diminishes the differences among them and, by making them all into epigones of Jacques Derrida, contains and reduces their work. I remember in particular a New York Times Sunday Magazine feature on the Yale School that included a photograph of Hillis Miller in a New Haven pizza place. Why would the popular and academic press need to enact that reduction, to "name" "the Yale School"? Whence any need to contain difference by the political use of the naming function that, along with the communicative function, constructs language's "nature"? We might say that the critique of metaphysics as presence posed a threat to persons who wished to perpetuate certain aspects of metaphysics from which they profited-such aspects, for example, as the power of deciding what's fit to print, what's true, what's valuable. Miller found it unpleasant when people said that deconstruction "is going to lead to the end of the western world," as though his critics construed his only job as maintaining it. I suspect that I speak for many compositionists when I say that I found Miller's early account of what we in the field do as similarly reductive and as much a product of needing to name as those responses to the Yale School. Turning "bad writers" into "good" ones is not all we do. We spend a lot of time de-constructing those categories and using that "deconstructive thinking as a way to imagine. . . movement toward a better form of democracy." Few compositionists--and, I suspect, no compositionist who cares about Hillis Miller--think that language has a "nature" or that practice tests theory or that empirical science can tell us much about what we want to know. We object to being understood in terms of five textbooks just as he resists being conflated with Geoffrey Hartman, Harold Bloom, or even Paul de Man. And we resist especially the strategy of containment that reduces our work to service.

I believed then that Miller's definition reduced composition studies to an “empiricized" freshman composition while reserving humanistic inquiry, for its own sake, for literary studies. The obvious question now is whether Miller's view has changed. In this interview, he speaks enthusiastically of the “methodological and theoretical aspects of the discipline," and he remarks on “a kind of link between 'high falutin' literary theory which appears to have nothing to do with composition in one direction and composition theory in the other." But when Gary Olson asks how Miller sees the role of composition changing, he replies that "the need to be able to write clearly and effectively for a given purpose is going to remain," and so "there's going to be a need to teach composition well in any conceivable university."

Clearly, Miller is now better informed about what we in the field do, but he evidently sees this research and theorizing as directed toward the improvement of a service (making "people write well"). This perception makes me uneasy. It is not, of course, that I oppose the service function. It is surely well within the rights of states to require the educational systems that they support to provide instruction in the direct and clear communication of the information that makes the society run. Nor would I diminish the important theoretical work of compositionists like Stephen North, Louise Wetherbee Phelps, David Bleich, and James Sosnoski, who seek to blur the conceptual and political boundaries between teaching and research. What makes me uneasy about Miller's positions is that he seems to see composition studies only as service. Miller is distanced by enormous social and political structures from most of the people who teach composition on a daily basis. His account of what he thinks we do is, I believe, informed by his interest in our continuing to do it and thereby relieve him and his colleagues from "shouldering the burden of expository writing." I am troubled by the dissociation of service from research, as though composition had no inquiry and literary studies no service. This dissociation, as I see it, is consistent with students' commodification of their education, their disinclination to ponder the workings of language, the heavy responsibilities of writing program administrators, the appalling exploitation of part-time faculty, and state legislators' demands for larger classes, more teaching, less attention to theory, and more "basics."

Responding to this interview has therefore been for me a difficult ethical task--in both senses. What's the right thing to do and how can I find the ethos in which to do it? It would be churlish (not to mention stupid) to fail to appreciate the support entailed in Miller's remark that "respectable people" in the Department of English at the University of California at Irvine voted to have a tenure-track position in writing, "believe it or not." But what really is difficult for me to believe is that there is only one tenure-track position, that it has taken this long to get it, and that he thinks composition studies still needs such respectability as professors of literary studies can give. My ethical problem is typical of the position of writing program administrators in departments of English. Should composition programs separate from departments of English or try to continue communicating within a situation in which they are treated with condescension? For the moment, I'll choose the latter, adopt Miller's belief that the "political goes byway of the ethical," and read the language in which Miller characterizes composition in an effort to demonstrate why I still see difficulties.

Composition and Disciplinarity

Ibegin by comparing Miller's treatment of composition studies to his account of other academic enterprises. Feminism, for example, cannot be reduced: "You can't say feminism holds such and such" because it is "a very diverse movement." Feminist theory has had an effect on the makeup of doctoral exams ("even when the candidate is male"). Feminism even expands out of the academy into the 1992 presidential campaign, and as Fish avers, "You measure the value of a theory by the way it becomes effective outside the academy." And new historicism calls upon us to read "non-literary" texts "just as carefully and with just as much intelligence and imagination as you would read Shakespeare." Cultural criticism expands into African American studies. Both cultural criticism and deconstruction have "an understanding that the way you make changes is not by abstract political pronouncements but by the active work of reading or teaching something."

Feminism is described as breaking institutional boundaries such that "everybody's work is transformed." Social criticism intervenes in the institution "by changing what's actually taught in the classroom" and "by the active work of reading or teaching something." Cultural criticism sees that it we have to transform rather than repudiate" theory. Western theory is "transformed" by translation into Chinese. Miller himself has "transformed" Burke. Deconstruction has been "transformed" in Edward Said's Beginnings. "American studies... is in the midst of a radical transformation" into ethnic multiculturalism. And composition "will be part of that" ethnic multiculturalism because "ESL is a large part of the challenge in teaching English composition at a place like Irvine," although "it's not that people who have English as a first language can't be very bad writers--they often are”

Whereas "transformation" is thefigure for literary studies, the language of containment and remediation describes writing and its teaching. This account of composition studies is so condescending and reductive (and widespread) that many compositionists want to leave their institutional "homes" and strike out on their own. But Miller does not think that's a good idea. In "The Function of Rhetorical Study at the Present Time," he writes, "The worst catastrophe that could befall the study of English literature would be to allow the programs in expository writing to become separate empires in the universities and colleges wholly cut off from the departments of English and American literature" (emphasis added 203). In this interview, he describes a discussion at Irvine about "whether composition ought to be taken away from the English Department and given to some dean, made a cross-school program" (emphasis added). One can't help noticing that in these sentences composition programs become objects to be given and taken away, allowed to go and come.  Then, he asserts that "composition ought to stay in English departments, not to help composition but to help English departments. It's good for them to have the composition people."

Miller's response to Olson's obvious question (Why should we stay where we are treated with contempt?) is simply astounding: Composition programs might be "weaker from the point of view of having clout with the administration, getting money.... [Composition] does gain something from having the strong budgetary support of an English department." Composition programs in state universities, staffed by part-time faculty who have no benefits, merit pay, or hope of tenure, do not seem to me to have gained very much from the budgetary support of English departments. These programs do make money, however, and English departments have gained much (release time, research leave, low teaching loads for persons who do not teach writing) from that strong economic support. This exchange is more persuasive as a discussion of symbolic capital: the English department lends the prestige of the humanities to composition's service function. On the whole, though, I find actual capital more useful: I wholeheartedly support his recommendation of "a stated separate budget for composition within the English Department to secure the support for composition."

To perceive composition studies as having both a research and a service function (analogous with literary studies) would probably require changing the name and the institutional identity of the English department. Composition studies can be seen as central to the conceptual project of departments of semiotics or departments of rhetoric or departments of cultural studies, but not to traditional departments of English. Any of these names, and any of the corresponding shifts in the hierarchical structures of value, would be good for compositionists. But when Olson asks whether Miller believes that the future of literary criticism and the English department itself lies in departments of rhetoric, Miller's reply preserves the traditional notion of English departments with the traditional privileged position for literary studies. Such departments, he says, have obligations to teach literary history, and that "could only with difficulty be put under the rubric of rhetoric." Are we to infer that he believes that literary histories are in some sense not rhetoricized? Pressed, Miller is "prepared to say that that's part of rhetoric, but it's obviously stretching it a little bit." But if, like Kenneth Burke, Miller believes that "literature ought to matter to individual human life or to society," then surely departments of English should look at how the writing of literary history has excluded the "works by women and so-called minorities" who now appear on the Ph.D. exams at Irvine (even when the candidate is male), and compositionists with their exciting "methodological and theoretical" tools should "be there." And although Miller grants the "obligation to teach an understanding of ethnic communities within the larger community," he thinks that "to call this rhetoric might unnecessarily limit it." But then, a curious turn: Texts, Miller says, are best taught by reading "that's where rhetoric, a rhetorical approach, is necessary... [and] there's a kind of link ... a natural alliance ... between the young people who do literary theory ...  and the people who do composition theory ... something a good department would want to advance."

Here is what I see happening. Three terms--rhetoric, reading, and composition-arein play. Reading is the privileged term; composition is reduced and contained. Rhetoric is presented by Olson as a bridge term, one that entails the other two, forming a synthesis in which writing and reading, understood deconstructively, could operate together "responsibly" to pro- duce the reformed institution Miller calls for in which "teaching and writing about literature and culture [are seen] as being an active intervention." But Miller opposes adopting the term rhetoric to name the reformed, reconceived English department, and he brings in the stretching and limiting opposition to say how. But the stretching and limiting of "rhetoric" becomes an aporia in which I get (first) lost and then (of course) very interested. If rhetoric is "the investigation of figures of speech, rather than the art of persuasion, though the notion of persuasion is still present," how would it be "limiting" to ask how women, "so-called minorities," and canonical figures find, in any situation (literary and non-literary), the available means of persuasion? And how would it be "stretching" rhetoric to investigate how these texts are included, excluded, and otherwise appropriated into literary (or any) histories? The "natural alliance" between literary theory and composition theory has as its project to investigate how language makes selves (or subject positions), knowledge, and value. The advantage (to composition studies) of the renamed department is that the renaming would, in the context of the generational change Miller describes in this interview, tend to efface the tropes of containment that have governed us and our work for so long. It would also provide an institutional venue for addressing questions of what Miller calls the "ideality of the literary object" by investigating the generic boundaries of the literary as well as opportunities to look at the rhetorical construction of knowledge.

It's hard to see why Miller opposes the naming, and the more he explains, the more confusing he gets. Olson asks how, having deconstructed the writing/reading opposition and thereby permitted us all to see how "reading is itself a kind of writing, or writing is a trope for the act of reading," Miller would prevent composition from being resubsumed under "English as reading." He responds by urging us to "persuade the rest of the English department that it's their responsibility to teach reading." "Composition people," he says, "have got to depend to some degree on the people in the English department and other language departments to do some, if not most, of the teaching of reading," even in the sense that includes writing. But then (is he changing his mind?): "Insofar as that's a rhetorical skill, it goes along with Stanley [Fish's] suggestion that they ought to be called departments of rhetoric." Even within what Miller calls "rhetorical reading," he seems still to preserve the hierarchy in which literary studies is privileged over composition.

This privilege is legible in Miller's surprising response to the question about whether he considers himself a writer. His demurral suggests that he reserves the name "writer" for authors of literary texts. There seems to be a quadripartite division in Miller's use of the term. First, there are Writers: artists, like George Eliot, William Carlos Williams, and Wallace Stevens, in whose company he does not count himself. Then, in an MLA President's column reprinted in Theory Now and Then, Miller distinguishes a "primary writer" like Blanchot from "the more humble metier of 'secondary writing' as you or I might be obligated to practice it" (301). After Writers like George Eliot, primary writers like Blanchot and secondary writers like Hillis Miller and the rest of us, we have (presumably) students in freshman comp and ESL classes.

How might one understand this quadripartite class system in the context of institutionalized English departments? A further gloss is perhaps available in Versions of Pygmalion, wherein Miller approvingly quotes Henry James' belief "that writing, say writing The Golden Bowl, is a thing done that does other things in its turn," and he wonders, "In what sense is reading novels, poems or philosophical texts, teaching them, or writing about them a thing done that does other things in its turn?" (15). His answer seems to be that such privileged Writing promotes ethical reading, an obligatory activity that "means a suspension of other responsibilities and contractual obligations, to my family, my institution, to my students and colleagues, whose ‘secondary' texts I have a perpetually mounting obligation to assess" (19). And ethical reading can promote teaching. Teaching is "the public expression or allegory. . . of the act of reading." And "you teach in the way you've learned that you ought to." This notion of teaching as the replication of cultural value through institutional authority inevitably relegates professional attention to the production 'of texts as a "secondary" activity performed on secondary texts by secondary people.

The notion that teaching composition is "making people able to write" sustains these institutions of authority. But then, late in the interview, Miller makes a surprising turn: "The key to teaching writing probably is to convince students that ... they're in some kind of situation that they've got to write their way out of." This "ethical" account of teaching writing strikes me as quite wonderful (even though Miller draws all his examples from literary texts) and quite at odds with his positions elsewhere in the interview.

A Question of Ethics

Many thinkers and teachers who choose to call themselves compositionists share Miller's belief that "quite a lot is at stake in the choice of what you study in a course, in what you write about, and in how you do it." And it is for that reason that so many of us are looking critically at the rhetorical construction of the disciplines and giving careful critical attention to teaching the ways in which those constructions reduce and exclude people. Attention to the work of rhetoricians like Chaim Perelman and Stephen Toulmin has prompted compositionists to call into question the very conception of disciplinarity as a traditional system of procedures and techniques for testing answers to paradigmatic questions. Researchers in composition borrow procedures from several disciplines, but they do not always use them in traditionally sanctioned ways. Rather, like Kenneth Burke, they "go off in all directions" seeking post-disciplinary solutions to concrete problems. Miller would, I suspect, find those "composition persons" useful allies in his argument with the philosophers who accuse him of crossing disciplinary boundaries to study and "transform" Kant's Critique. Instead, although it seems to be okay for him to read philosophy deconstructively, he worries about "younger," postmodern thinkers who lack formal disciplinary training in the fields they study. He implies that he finds it irresponsible of them not to train themselves in the disciplines at issue.

It seems to me that Miller most often applies the adjective responsible to courses of action that preserve the status quo. Those whom the institution has treated well tend to think of it as responsible and want to preserve it. But those who do not perceive themselves as having been treated well by the institution tend to see its behavior as irresponsible and to seek alternatives. I honor Hillis Miller's contributions toward making our institution more responsible than it is, but he must know that for ethical reasons, many decomposition people" may decide--soon--no longer to "be there."