JAC Volume 15 Issue 1

Hillis Miller has been a friend to composition studies for fifteen years. He has repeatedly and successfully used his great influence to make research in the teaching of writing legitimate. And I take great pride in saying that Hillis Miller has been a good friend to me. In 1980 when I was teaching at Francis Marion College, a small liberal arts college in South Carolina, I received an NEH research fellowship. In the proposal that won me the fellowship, I admitted that I knew little about "Theory," but I explained my hunch that "Theory" might offer a way to bridge the broadening chasm between literature and composition, an accomplishment that seemed important to me (and apparently to NEH) at the time. I decided to spend my leave in New Haven, for New Haven in 1980 was where "Theory" was being written and spoken. One could stand on the sidewalk outside Naples Pizza-the noontime gathering spot for the "Yale School"-and read the pun that someone had inscribed in the wet concrete, "Derrida etais ici.” Deconstruction and Criticism was hot off the press, and English departments were abuzz with a sense of life that we baby boomers (at least this baby boomer) had not seen before.

Linda Peterson, who was still an untenured assistant professor at Yale, arranged quarters for me in Branford College, where I settled down for a four-month stay. I approached Geoffrey Hartman and Hillis Miller by explaining that I wanted to know more about pedagogy. Miller and Hartman, of course, were wise enough to know that "Theory" would remain sterile if it did not affect pedagogy: "Theory is of no use," as Miller puts it in his interview with JAC, "unless it's used for something," even if "using it means changing it." In my first meetings with Hartman and Miller, I explained that I wanted to try to write a book linking theory in general and deconstruction in particular to the field of composition studies. I was astonished (I remain astonished even today) that two such eminent scholars-they literally had the academic world at their door in those days-would take the time to help an obscure assistant professor from an obscure college work in a field that seemed quite remote from Yale. Neither of them knew me very well, and neither had any obligation to me whatsoever, yet both were exceedingly kind. They invited me to their seminars, took me to lunch, introduced me to Harold Bloom and Paul de Man, and generally opened the doors of Yale intellectual life to me. Miller even invited me to his home. By the end of my stay, Miller and I had begun meeting occasionally at my apartment in Branford for a run up Prospect Hill to the Divinity School; on one occasion we went for a run through the countryside near his farmhouse.

Without the letters of recommendation from Hartman and Miller that grew out of my four-month stay in New Haven, I would never have been able to move from Francis Marion to Northern Illinois (a university with a Ph.D. program in rhet/comp); without the education I received at Yale, I would never have been able to write Plato, Derrida, and Writing; without that book I would not have gotten tenure at Northern Illinois and certainly never would have ended up at Vanderbilt. Thus, my personal debt to Hillis Miller is profound. He (and his colleague Geoffrey Hartman) opened the way that has become my career (a career that, though certainly modest by the standards of Hillis Miller, nevertheless astonishes me). Indeed, all of us in composition studies owe Hillis Miller a debt because he has used his influence and his many national positions (including his presidency of the MLA) to make our work legitimate. I remember the months at Yale fondly. Hanging around with the "Yale School" and seeming to be "in the know" was exhilarating. More particularly, however, I remember two conversations with Miller that occurred near the end of my stay. Those conversations (which I am sure Miller does not remember) have become a metonomy both for my own relationship with deconstruction and for my concern about the effect deconstruction has on composition studies. Before each conversation, I spent several days working through my understanding of the term deconstruction. OnceI had my thoughts "straight," I inflicted myself on Miller long enough to articulate those thoughts. Each time, Miller replied thoughtfully and patiently that my notions were insightful and interesting, but not quite correct; and he went on to point out weaknesses, oversimplifications, and gaps in my reading. A few days before leaving New Haven to return to South Carolina, where I would resume teaching basic writing to poorly prepared students at my brand new (established in 1975) commuter college, I was preparing myself for a third and final try at articulating my notions of deconstruction. In doing so, I finally realized both what Miller was trying to teach me and what he was trying not to teach me.

On the one hand, Miller was trying to teach me that deconstruction--insofar as it labels something as diverse as the reading strategies of Bloom, de Man, Derrida, Hartman, and Miller--is not a term or name that can bring order and hence peace to one's intellectual life. Nor is it a methodology that will organize and inform daily pedagogy. In short, my logocentric, highly authoritarian strategy for "defining" deconstruction was itself a misunderstanding of deconstruction. My desire to "name"and “understand" deconstruction demonstrated my own intellectual shortcomings.

On the other hand, Miller was trying to conceal from me my role as the mark in a shell game. As one of the reigning gurus of deconstruction, Miller could not allow a bandwagon rider to define the term, for once such an epigone succeeded in defining deconstruction, the definer him- or herself could begin making decisions about the value of deconstruction. In other words, once "deconstruction" became a normalized, domesticated "activity" speakable by one of its epigones, deconstruction would be indistinguishable from "existentialism," "structuralism," or any other twentieth-century term that, having been tamed, has ossified.

A Doubled Need

This double situation--on the one hand learning about deconstruction while on the other learning about learning about deconstruction--led then and leads now to a nightmarish conundrum. How does a group--any group, no matter what its size--decide to privilege a few important voices while silencing all of the other voices? Of course, this is not a new conundrum; even in fourth-century Athens, the most radical democracy the world has yet known, only one percent of the people on the Pnyx actually spoke with influence and authority. To be who he was in 1980, Hillis Miller needed me (well, not me personally but someone to play the role "learner"). In an opposed way, I needed Hillis Miller then and continue to need him now so that I can play the role "student" or, for purposes of this text, "respondent." Unfortunately, this doubled need for teacher and pupil foregrounds metonymically the field in which I work. Composition studies seems to need Hillis Miller (or Richard Rorty, or Stanley Fish, or Mary Field Belenky, or whomever) in order to have something to say to itself. While composition studies most emphatically does not need "leading intellectuals" to have work to do--the students come by the millions each fall--composition studies does seem to need "leading intellectuals" to have something to say about what it does.

As the JAC interviews make plain, some voices deserve to be heard above all the others, and none of the voices that deserve to be heard lives in the body of a rhet/comp person. Few would dispute that Miller's is one of the voices that deserve to be heard, just as few would dispute Miller's claim that Derrida, Heidegger, Husserl, and Hegel are other voices that deserve to be heard. "Some people," as Miller puts it, "are better readers than others." The best readers, like Miller or Derrida, always ask us to allow them a certain authorial space. "Try to notice,"' Miller asks, "whether I might conceivably not be speaking for myself but doing what any literary critic has to do: trying to speak for the author that I'm discussing or even for some imagined position which I'm then going to differ from.” “Caveat lector,”as Hartman puts it, because the texts of the "boadeconstructors" are always situated (Bloom et al. ix). And the situation of their texts, Miller explains in his interview, prevents any sort of straightforward reading:

People will say that Derrida talks about "the free play of language in the void" or something, and you go back and find he's really talking about Levi-Strauss in that passage and the formulation is only made possible by the reading of the particular author. I think it's often forgotten in what you might call pedagogical accounts of Derrida, accounts used in teaching him, that almost all his work is the reading of some text or other. That's certainly true of my own work.

With its space secure and its "meaning" complicated far beyond any sort of summary, a privileged voice such as Miller's can then be free to make the standard demands: responsibility, tradition, truth, democracy.

Miller warns against the irresponsibility of undertaking cultural studies without knowing the necessary original languages or the "protocols of social science research"; he requires that anyone undertaking a study of any intellectual phenomenon (deconstruction in particular) study its history back through several centuries; he insists on such notions as "truth and falsehood" and "good and bad readings"; and he insists that both he and Derrida want "to use deconstructive thinking as a way to imagine the possible movement toward a better form of democracy." Thus, he assumes the role of spokesperson for and defender of academic responsibility, historical integrity, truth, goodness, and democracy. And in a typically American way, he assumes this role with an air of humility, refusing to call himself a writer and claiming to be no more than a teacher: "My writing is an adjunct to teaching. Though it's something I do seriously, I think writer is too big a word for what I do."

I suspect that most people who have known Miller would grant him all these titles. Though he is an aggressive, tenacious opponent, even his bitterest professional antagonists would be likely to grant that he is humble and that he does stand for responsibility, integrity, truth, goodness, and democracy. In light of all this--in light of responsibility, integrity, truth, goodness, democracy, and humility, especially when those traits are joined with my personal and everyone's professional obligations to Miller--how am I to “respond"?

By pointing out the danger.

A Danger to Composition

The danger, as I have already argued in responding to Derrida's JAC inter- view two years ago, is both real and significant. Were the notions Miller and Derrida articulate to prevail, composition studies would become philosophi- cal literary criticism. As he made clear in his 1990 interview, Derrida is "on the side of philosophy"; he stands foursquare against sophistry and a freestanding rhetoric. Rhetoric "as a separate discipline," he fears, "may become a sort of empty instrument whose usefulness or effectiveness would be independent of logic, or even reference or truth." "Contrary to what some people think I think," Derrida continues, "I would be on the side of philosophy, logic, truth, reference, etc." While warning about the danger of oversimplifying, Derrida nevertheless says, "If the sophists are what Plato thinks they are, I'm not in favor of the sophists" (16-17). In language almost identical to Derrida's, Miller carefully separates both himself and deconstruction from sophistry-whether the sophistry of Protagoras and Gorgias, or that quite different sophistry of Protagoras and Gorgias. "I would be more willing," Miller picks up Derrida's language, "to say that Plato is the founder of deconstruction than to say the sophists were." Though Miller, like Derrida, warns that we know very little about the sophists, he draws a clear distinction between deconstruction and sophistry, arguing that the texts of Protagoras and Gorgias bear "no relation to what deconstructionists say." Miller hedges this by directing us to "go back and read Plato"; if we do, Miller assures us, we will see that Plato is "not what [we've] been led to expect.”

Well, I have gone back and read Plato. I even learned Greek, in part because I know what Miller thinks of scholars who cannot read a text in its original language. And I found exactly what I expected. Through his Socrates, Plato creates the voice with which Jacques Derrida and Hillis Miller speak. And the metaphysics of that voice privileges thinking over speaking, speaking over writing, philosophy over rhetoric, and truth over sophistry. If composition studies decides to speak with Plato's voice, composition re- search will embark on an unending journey toward truth, a journey that no mortal can ever complete; as a result, composition studies will be indistinguishable from philosophy or literary criticism. Indeed, the discursive practices and analytic strategies used in composition studies will grow directly out of Platonic hermeneutics, leaving composition studies forever trapped in the role Aristotle gives it, the role of paraphues, a doubly dependent, mixed metaphor type of offshoot--an inquiry unable to sustain itself without the root and branch systems of literary criticism and philosophy (Rhetoric 1356^a2O-35). Thus, when Miller calls for composition to remain in English departments on "principled reasons," he is being absolutely honest. He does not seek the money that follows the teaching of writing; rather, he seeks the utterly Platonic intellectual enterprise in which communication lags behind and serves thinking, thereby allowing thinking to remain prior to and independent of its vehiculation, thereby giving truth a never-quite- realized but entirely safe residence. With such truth safely privileged, teachers can discharge their "responsibilities" by "displaying" what they "know.”

 Call an intellectual a sophist, in other words, and-even if the intellectual is a "boadeconstructor" like Hillis Miller or Jacques Derrida--you will have a fight on your hands. "Sophist" is the one thing an honest, truthful, clear-thinking, responsible intellectual cannot be.

 Philosophy, however, is not the only danger Miller's reclamation of composition entails, for he has a very particular notion of rhetoric, a notion that he has consistently made clear at least since 1979. Miller defines rhetoric as the study of figures of speech. This definition, it seems to me, generates two possible responses. One response would be to point out that in the strictest, most classical terms, Miller makes rhetoric into a subset of itself At least since Aristotle, rhetoric has consisted of five canons (invention, arrangement, style, memory, and delivery) and three appeals (ethos, pathos, and logos). If Miller had his way, this classical rhetoric (the sort of rhetoric that Burke, Corbett, Horner, Lunsford, Perelman, Toulmin and numerous others have tried to articulate recently) would be reduced to one part of one part. Invention, arrangement, memory, delivery, ethos, pathos, logos, and most of style would be gone. The study of metaphor (which is only one part of style) would be left. I do not know one single rhetorician or composition studies person who would consider such a reduction wise. Asking rhetoric to undergo such radical surgery would be like asking literary criticism to pay attention only to lyric poetry, leaving to others everything from novels, plays, and films to nonfiction prose and longer poetry. A second response to Miller's reduction of rhetoric to a subset of itself would be to point out that Miller changes rhetoric into a particular kind of philological hermeneutics. While one can easily imagine a rhetoric with this focus, all of us who learned to teach writing by teaching New Criticism in the 1970s know how sterile and ineffective this focus would make our pedagogy.

A Question of Pedagogy

So, how might I reconcile my genuine feelings of debt and my unquestioned high regard for Hillis Miller as a friend and advocate with my reservations about his notions of what composition ought to do? Unseemly as it will be, I will say that Miller simply does not understand (and of course I recognize the statistical probability that I am doing nothing more than trying to reverse roles with him so that I can prevent his occupying any location from which he might speak).  I will offer two examples.

The first example has to do with pedagogy. By 1986 Miller had already weighed in against "'libertarian pedagogy." Then, as now, Miller saw teaching as an interchange between the teacher and a text. Students are not "partners" in the interchange; rather, they are "witnesses or overhearers." Miller fears a pedagogy in which teachers engage directly in an interchange with their students, a pedagogy "in which the students all say what they want and the teacher just facilitates this." Such pedagogy "frees" the teacher from the teacher's major responsibility, Miller argues, and obviates the sort of display that Miller equates with good teaching.

What Miller does not seem to understand is that the only meaningful texts in the composition class already belong to the students. One cannot teach composition by "displaying" one's "interaction with the text at hand" because no "text at hand" exists as an object of study whose power and beauty allow for a professional explication. While one can imagine a composition classroom in which a teacher "displays" the teacher's "activity of reading" as the teacher "interacts" with a representative student paper, I doubt that anyone would take such pedagogy seriously. What Miller has in mind, indeed what Miller cannot see beyond, is the demonstrative explication of a canonized text. That, for him, is teaching. Anything other than that falls into the category of irresponsible professional behavior. Incredibly, Miller claims that libertarian pedagogy was already at work in the Yale English department thirty years ago. In those days, William Wimsatt and his colleagues merely assigned topics and sat back to listen as the students did the teaching. Is it possible that Miller cannot see the difference between graduate seminars at Yale in the early sixties and Jane Tompkins' classes at Duke today? No one at Yale, least of all the students, thought the students were free to express themselves or make up their own educations. Students at Yale in 1960 were doing everything in their power to imitate Wimsatt; that Wimsatt did little directly to show them what he wanted did not free them. Quite the contrary, it showed just how rigid his desires were. 'Mose desires were so rigid, so clear, and so unassailable that no one needed to "demonstrate" them. I suspect that the only difference between Miller's pedagogy and Wimsatt's is that Miller demonstrates what he wants while Wimsatt left the students to figure it out for themselves.

The second example of the danger Miller offers comes at the end of his interview. After a long and interesting paragraph about the ethical dimension of writing, Miller ends by saying "I don't know that saying this ... will help at all in teaching writing." The reason his speculation probably won't help with teaching writing is that Miller is and always has been a literary critic. And, like it or not, literary criticism has less to do with teaching writing than do philosophy, linguistics, and anthropology and no more to do with teaching writing than do economics, management, or even civil engineering.

 So, would it be rude to thank Hillis Miller (profusely and with genuine gratitude) for his help while completely ignoring his advice? I hope so. While an experienced, committed composition teacher can surely learn a great deal about how to do scholarship by looking at the way Miller does it, such a composition teacher must listen to Miller at all times with the acute awareness that the explication of canonized texts is probably the most indirect and least probable way of teaching writing. While one can surely teach writing through such demonstrative explication, one is much more likely to generate a pedagogy that excludes all those who cannot, like the Yale graduate students of the sixties, figure out all by themselves what the teacher wants.