JAC Volume 17 Issue 1

In Professional Academic Writing, Susan Peck MacDonald makes the observation that recent debates in rhetoric and composition about whether to initiate students into disciplinary practices or "resist" current practices have frequently been framed in terms of "accommodation" versus "resistance," and adds that "these may be destructive dichotomies for us to be working with" particularly "given the lack of close rhetorical and linguistic scrutiny we have spent on describing the nature, variation, or effects of textual practices in the humanities and social sciences" (17).

When a field finds itself trapped in a particular dichotomy, it's time to re-examine research methods and agendas. I will be arguing that while, as Peck MacDonald notes, there is always a need for more close rhetorical and linguistic scrutiny of texts in the humanities and social sciences, there is an accompanying need for a reassessment of the kinds of linguistic scrutiny that have traditionally been employed and the kinds of texts that have been examined if further reification of the accommodation/resistance dichotomy is to be avoided. Accounts of disciplinary writing have too often begun with the goal of observing a student's "socialization" or "initiation" into a discipline. I offer that it is in part the design and methods of the initiation study which help preserve the accommodation/resistance dichotomy in debates over whether or not to initiate students—if not the concept of initiation itself. Such studies concern themselves with how a subject learns or doesn't learn the discourse of what is generally posited as a "community," whether that community be the academy, or a particular discipline, or a particular classroom. Yet because the inquiry stops at or before the point at which the subject exhibits knowledge of the new discourse, questions about how the subject uses or doesn't use this knowledge in various subsequent contexts are left unanswered. Outcomes of initiating or socializing a student into a particular discourse are assumed rather than explored and so we are left with the theoretical either/or situation; either the student resists, or the student accommodates the new discourse.

But what happens if we go beyond that first year? As Peck MacDonald notes, scholars—particularly feminist scholars—are using the terms of the accommodation versus resistance debate to discuss how members of disciplinary communities are affected by the textual practices of that community (18). As these theoretical questions and ethical issues are raised, it would seem particularly germane to examine the textual practices of someone who has made the transition from "outsider" to "insider." In what follows I would like to offer a glimpse of such a transition first by re-examining data from Carol Berkenkotter, Thomas Huckin and John Ackerman's landmark study of the first year in the life of graduate student Nate, and second, by taking a look at Nate's work at significant junctures in his professional life—particularly his dissertation and work now as a tenured professor.¹ In 1991 it was revealed by first author Carol Berkenkotter that subject Nate was none other than third author John Ackerman, a fact that is not irrelevant to the following discussion; I am going to refer to both Ackerman and Nate as "Nate," not to imply any coherent subjectivity between the two but to highlight the fiction-making element that is always a part of research. As the Nate of 1995, then, noted in a postscript to the original study, Nate is interesting not so much for what he is as what he can be made to symbolize, and he has been made to symbolize a lot. "Virtual Nate, a free floating subjectivity" has been enlisted to serve on both sides of debates over accommodation and resistance, social construction and agency as well as cognition and community by commentators Patricia Bizzell, Linda Flower and Carol Berkenkotter, among others, yet the original fault lines of these debates remain largely intact (Ackerman, Postscript 147). It is not my intention here to offer another narrative of Nate's experience along the critical lines already demarcated so much as to expose through a more sweeping, historic look at Nate's work, how those lines got there in the first place. Critical to this process will be an explication of some of the limitations faced by sociolinguistic accounts of student experiences.

The Nate study shares much with initiation studies which use undergraduates as their subjects. Like many initiation studies, the authors describe Nate as entering a new discourse community—an idea owing much to Dell Hymes' notion of "speech community."² Also as in many initiation studies, the focus is on the student's negotiation of the clash between a previous discourse and the discourse of the new community. According to the authors, however, the Nate study is a departure from previous initiation studies in concluding that a student seeking to enter a new discourse community need absorb some conception of the epistemological issues and research methods of that new discipline in addition to that discipline's rhetorical conventions in order to demonstrate communicative competence in that field. The clash in question is not only one of writing style, then, it is one of epistemologies, as well.

To illustrate the significance of the changes Nate goes through, the authors must first define Nate's epistemology and writing style. In order to define the latter the authors study the writing Nate produced during a National Endow ment for the Humanities Seminar the summer before the rhetoric program and note that, within this community, Nate wrote with a "well-defined persona, selecting active, colorful verbs and metaphoric constructions" (16). To describe Nate's philosophy of writing they make note of the humanist bent of Nate's previous education; the authors cite passages from a paper Nate wrote which argued for the existence of the writer's inner "voice"—an idea given little credence in his new program. "Nate held the writer's voice to be as individual as a thumbprint. He was therefore taken aback early in his first semester at a professor's suggestion that his (and other graduate students') prose would come to reflect their thinking `as research scientists'" (18). Excerpts from Nate's frequent self-reports help fill out the portrait of Nate as romantic individualist.

Having established Nate's background, the authors then turn to an analysis of Nate's writing within the rhetoric program. In order to analyze Nate's ongoing negotiation of the new discipline's rhetorical conventions, quantitative measures are developed to compare the papers that Nate writes for class with selected articles in the field. Units such as "average sentence length," "connectives" and "number of first person pronouns" are created and counted. Three rhetoricians were asked to read Nate's texts in order to identify "sociolinguistically inappropriate vocabulary," and to mark any words that struck them as being "off-register," either for being "too casual" or for being "too formal or belletristic" (14). The comparison group of articles in the field thus became the standard against which Nate's texts are judged for evidence of communicative competence. Using this method of "context-sensitive text analysis" (Huckin 5) in which words are judged in relation to current disciplinary community conventions, the authors establish that Nate does indeed learn the rhetorical conventions of his new field as with the passage of time, his texts increasingly display more of the linguistic features associated with the writing within that field.

This portrait of rhetorical shift is certainly a persuasive one. It becomes even more persuasive when one peruses Nate's self-reports and finds increasingly even in those personal writings, incidences of the "appropriate vocabulary." Yet as author/subject Nate himself pointed out in his postscript years later, "It is one thing to equate rhetorical process with product, in the way that a text can be read for the presence or absence of planning or of an appropriate register. It is something else to attempt to locate a writer according to his or her affiliations, epistemological preferences, or ideology" (145). What is more difficult to identify, in other words, are the shifts in Nate. Yet such shifts—that is, shifts in subjectivity—are inevitably the stakes in debates in composition, even where they aren't the focus of a particular study. The thorniness of identifying such shifts will be the focus of what follows.

I remember that when I first read the Nate study, one particular passage stopped me in my tracks—first because it made me laugh (rare in my academic reading), and second because it brought me to question the whole framework of "initiation." The following excerpt from one of Nate's later papers is described by the authors as "a humorous jab at conflicting research approaches":

It is here that we see the limits of a sociolinguistic account which necessarily reads "staying in" a certain discourse to be evidence of sufficient "comfort" with that discourse. According to Glyn Williams, the particular brand of sociolinguistics isn't significant as virtually any sociolinguistic approach would make Berkenkotter et al.'s reading of the passage inevitable. In an intellectual history and sociological critique of sociolinguistics, Williams argues persuasively that most strains of sociolinguistics including conversation analysis, studies of speech variation, and ethnographies of communication all share the common theoretical root of Parsonian structural functionalism: "Structural functionalism is the perspective which has been adopted uncritically by most sociolinguists to the extent that sociolinguistics can, to a very great extent, be regarded as the structural functional discussion of language in society" (41). According to Williams' analysis, Parson believed in the necessity of socialization in order to produce individuals whose dispositions and needs were consistent with their role in society. Williams points out that most strains of sociolinguistics reflect this principle in that "human behavior [tends] to be explained in terms of its contribution to the reproduction of society" (232). These explanations demand that subjects have a "readable" subjectivity—a subjectivity that is not only readable to the researcher, but to the subject, herself, as well:

This reading of the rat-in-the-box passage necessarily presupposes a coherence between language and being—a presupposition challenged by poststructuralist thought, but one which is congruent with structural functionalism. To abandon the structural functionalist perspective is to open up the questions and explore the inconsistencies which the "enough" introduces. For example, while the "rat-in-the-box" passage could indeed reveal Nate's comfort with academic style, a move into the academy and towards consensus, many of Nate's comments about the passage in his self-reports suggest a discomfort with the transition to academic style. The idea for the "rat-in-the-box" passage came to him while he was reading a particularly dry article. He writes: "I stopped once and pondered how much I dislike this non-personal style, knowing that I have to learn the conventions but remarking how really boring it was." Of the writing of the rat passage itself Nate comments "I found myself writing to an outside audience, a person I haven't written to in some time now." Nate's move inside the discipline as indexed by his use of certain rhetorical markers is paradoxically directed outside the academy, an audience the paper he was writing was not destined for. As such, the passage really serves no "function" in terms of building consensus or social order—the purpose of language according to the Parsonian sociological theories upon which sociolinguistics is based. This alternative reading of this passage makes use of Elaine Chin's distinction between "contexts for writing" and "contexts of use for writing" (447, my emphasis). Chin observes that most studies of context and composing, largely because they focus on the impact of culture or "discourse community" on the composing process, tend to focus on the contexts of use for writing. In essence, Chin's distinction calls attention to the same structural functionalist bias in research in context and composing that Williams identifies in the bulk of sociolinguistics.

The rat-in-the-box passage complicates more than functionalist accounts of context for language use, however. This paradox that the passage represents (of seeking to be understood by others than those who would read it) complicates as well the portrait of the free subject of sociolinguistics whose rational thoughts are reflected in discourse. Julia Kristeva points out that the image of the subject as "a fixed unit coinciding with his [sic] discourse" represents one of the short-comings of contemporary linguistics. She appeals to psychoanalytic theory to redress this short-coming (274). If we look at the rat-in-the-box passage through the lens of psychoanalysis, which focuses upon double meanings in language and does not presume a congruence between subject and discourse, rather than through the lens sociolinguistics, we see it not as a collection of phrases but as parody, and this distinction and the reading it will allow carries with it significant implications for our understanding of disciplinary activity and academic writing.

Like many forms of humor, parody is a play upon form, one which suggests that any particular ordering of experience may be arbitrary and subjective, injecting temporary doses of relativity into positivist systems (Douglas 297). Parody in particular is a genre that plays upon well-established genres. Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu notes that parody has historically been used by "ex-believers" to ridicule "the form of thought and expression by which they were formerly possessed. . . simply by making it perceptible as the arbitrary convention it is" (Academicus 31). This appearance of parody in Nate's text for class, then, suggests that indeed Nate has acquired the language, such as it is. He can talk the talk. Yet Nate's use of parody also indicates that his relation to the language he has learned might be anything but comfortable. In his self-reports, Nate acknowledges that he tends to use humor in the way Bourdieu suggests, to counter the dominant discourse: "I never have been very serious about paying homage to either physical or metaphysical institutions. I've always found a way to bring them down, usually through sarcastic but good natured ribbing." Nate portrays his use of humor as a carnivalesque overturning of established social hierarchies (Bakhtin). It might be argued that the rat-in-the-box passage, then, serves the function of overturning the dominant discourse; yet as the strength of this overturning is entirely restricted by the consensus on which it depends for recognition, it has limited subversive power, and therefore, limited function (Douglas 305). Douglas points out that were a successful subversion of one form by another ever to occur, the joke would cease to be and would become something else—a revolution perhaps, but not a joke.

What a joke actually accomplishes or fails to accomplish might be a question for a debate over accommodation and resistance. In this discussion in which questions of language use will be divorced from questions of socialization what is more relevant is who hears the joke. Jokes often combine an unspeakable discourse with a speakable one, yet, because "jokes often establish connections by spurious means that carry no legitimacy in rational discourse" the unspeakable often remains unheard, as in the case of the parodic elements of the rat-in-the-box passage (Oring 14). In its possibly limited effects, parody shares much with other "arts of the contact zone" (Pratt, Arts). Mary Louise Pratt coined the term "contact zone" to describe "social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power" (37). Pratt's formulation of the contact zones stems from her formulation of "a linguistics of contact"—"A linguistics that [focuses] on modes and zones of contact between dominant and dominated groups, between persons of different and multiple identities. . . that focuses on how such speakers constitute each other relationally and in difference [and] how they enact those differences in language" (Utopias 60). According to Pratt, speakers enact those differences in language through textual acts such as parody, denunciation, imaginary dialogue, mediation to name a few. Potentially subversive, these textual acts exist in contact with, not separate from, expressions of the dominant discourse and as such are often missed, as Pratt notes, by teachers and researchers alike whose practices stem from community models of language use which presuppose that language functions to promote understanding between parties: "When linguistic (or literate) interaction is described in terms of orderliness, games, moves, or scripts, usually only legitimate moves are actually named as part of the system, where legitimacy is defined from the point of view of the party in authority" (Arts 38). The rat-in-the-box passage is both a community-building comment on a competing methodology (as the authors suggest), and a potentially subversive comment on academic writing as a whole, but the latter remains undetected by a sociolinguistic method that presumes discourse to be a consensus building enterprise among rational subjects.

Nate has his own professed problems with rationality. As the authors of the study note, his relationship to the "rationalist-realist" epistemology of his program is a somewhat vexed one, clashing as it does with his belief in "voice." In a 1995 gloss on the original study, however, Berkenkotter and Huckin conclude that Nate "assimilated the rationalist-realist epistemology that constitutes empiricist inquiry in the social sciences" (22). It is at this point that I would like again to step outside the scope of the original study to press some questions that are pertinent to the implications suggested by this as well as many other studies of socialization. In reference to such studies we might profitably ask: What does it mean to assimilate an epistemology? Does it mean to believe in it, to apply it in practice or merely to understand it or be able to apply it? Most importantly: Does that assimilation signify progress within a discipline? The kind of distinctions I am concerned with here in the relationship between subject and epistemology are similar to those distinctions between subject and discourse raised earlier in this discussion. They are further not unlike the distinctions Bourdieu makes regarding position and disposition. Bourdieu claims that there is no direct correspondence between one's position (say, for example, one's occupation) and one's dispositions or opinions. He further argues that one can't give a full account of the relationship between position and disposition:

A look at Nate's recent expressions of epistemological affiliations, for example, makes it difficult to maintain that Nate's problem embracing a particular epistemological stance was merely a first year phenomenon. He introduces his syllabus from his 1995 course Critical Perspectives in Literacy Research with this claim: "That the selection and enactment of a method is as much about us as them, is as much about the myopia of our gaze as about the clarity of our interpretation, and is a performance of who we choose to be in the worlds before us" (Syllabus 1). The concept of "voice," the source of such contestation his first year, resurfaces in his present work with the air of an accepted term needing no qualification of definition. At the end of a recent conference presentation, Nate urged writing researchers to "look for those instances . . . where the intersection of multiple voices can be recognized for change" (AERA 9).

A jump back, however, to Nate's dissertation, Reading and Writing in the Academy: A Comparison of Two Disciplines, complicates any smooth narrative one might want to construct of Nate as resistor of rationalist-realist epistemology as it is a prime example of the kind of empiricist inquiry in the social sciences that Berkenkotter and Huckin refer to. Nate's dissertation incorporates protocol data with product analyses tabulating, among other things, "source text content units with heights and importance," "means and standard deviations of rhetorical awareness," "ANOVA for origin and importance of information" (tables 8, 12, 17). Both process and product measures were subjected to inter-rater reliability tests, one of the standard indicators of empiricist inquiry as they function as checks on subjectivity.

Here Bourdieu might suggest that the dissertation may merit study in its own right as a stabilizer of epistemological waverings. He claims "nothing helps more than the doctoral thesis to reinforce the dispositions required" (Academicus 95). Coming from a Bakhtinian standpoint, the Nate of 1995 describes the impact of the dissertation in terms of the tension between centripetal and centrifugal forces: "The dissertation genre as well as other assignments exert a centripetal force not only to conform to stable language conventions but to stable identity conventions as well" (Postscript 4). In Bourdieu's language we might say that the particular context surrounding the dissertation narrows down "the space of available possibilities" for both language and identity expressions. Bourdieu's formulation differs significantly from Nate's here, however, in that it requires us to regard the dissertation—as well as other texts in the academy—not solely as genre, but as professionalizing mechanism as well. It requires us to looks at texts as things which exist in relationship to organizations (Myers).

The point that needs to be emphasized here is that I have not looked into the past and the present to create a portrait of the "true" Nate or even to contradict the essential conclusions of the original study. The fact that expressions of rationalist-realist epistemology appear in Nate's dissertation and formal papers in graduate school while expressions inconsistent with that epistemology surface in his informal writing as a graduate student and his present syllabus is not insignificant, but it says more about the way disciplines operate than it says about Nate. If anything characterizes Nate's self-reports that first year it is a continual mulling over of the pros and cons of epistemological stances. What concerns me is how the theoretical assumptions underlying the methods used in sociolinguistic accounts of student experiences encourage the creation of narratives of socialization and in so doing encourage defining of both subject and discipline. We have a tendency as a field to study either novices or professionals and assume the ways in which the former turn into the latter. But as Cheryl Geisler points out, studies which posit a continuum with the expert on one side and the novice on the other with increased skills being the determining factor fail to take into account social professionalizing mechanisms which create the great divide between lay and expert (207). And it is to a discussion of writing as "professionalizing mechanism" rather than as index of socialization that I would like to turn to now. In doing so I will be directed by the kind of questions that systemic functional linguists, Francis Sullivan points out, do not consider when conducting their analyses, that is: "how the elements of [a given] situation came to be organized that way, whose interests are served by that organization, whether all participants experience that organization in the same way, or whether that organization is itself at issue among participants" (420).

Nate's dual identity as both subject and third author was revealed in 1991. In his 1995 postscript to the study, Nate writes that the authors originally kept his identity a secret from the editors, reviewers and readership of Research in the Teaching of English because the field "had not yet published hybrid, collaborative research relationships, and thus to reveal our method was to take an unwise risk" (149). This reasoning speaks to the degree to which at least a certain section of the field in 1988 was perceived to be dominated by the rules of empiricism. Like Nate's use of parody, the authors' use of a pseudonym might be read as an attempt to render appropriate that which the field might consider "off-register."

Unfortunately, also like Nate's parody and other arts of the contact zone, the use of the pseudonym prevented a large piece of the story from being heard. If there was any one drawback to the initial obscuring of Nate's identity as third author of the study, it would be that in doing so, the authors also obscured a vital factor in Nate's becoming an insider: his active participation writing a study for publication. Berkenkotter et al. acknowledge that "to publish and to be cited is to enter the community's discourse" but they fail to explore the implications of this statement in regards to their subject (12). If, as Deborah Brandt argues, "you have to be a member first to acquire insider knowledge"—that the kind of knowledge that counts is accumulated tacitly as an outgrowth of routine practice—then nothing would have counted more than the opportunities Nate gained through his work on the Nate study (120).

So a third "reading" of Nate will now be offered, one that situates Nate within (i.e., more in contact with) the organization of the discipline suggesting that perhaps he was in some ways an insider from his first weeks in graduate school when his self-reports begin. It is not uncommon in these self-reports to run across notes which reveal the routineness of the routine practice of being a publishing member of the discipline: "First some details. Have you written the contract notes? Maybe we can work through them. Good luck with the NCTE stuff. Glad that I can be of some kind of service." The study provided Nate more than just an opportunity to publish, though. It provided him with an opportunity to practice ethnography and through that practice to acquire knowledge of ethnographic methods and epistemology in addition to the epistemology the authors focus on in their study. He writes to the first author about conversations with a colleague: "He was most interested in what you and I have talked and written about and it was in one of those conversations that I realized that I already know more than most or many of my colleagues about ethnographic research." What better way, one might ask, to learn a method than to interpret your own experience in the terms of that method. One could even argue that his experience as both researcher and subject led him to his present concern with investigating those roles (as reflected in his syllabus and his postscript). Last, but not least, working with the first two authors seemed to provide him an opportunity that few graduate students get: to voice their confusion, frustrations and triumphs not simply as student nor as subject, but in some sense, as a member. At the end of one such voicing he writes to Carol Berkenkotter, "Once more, you are a good friend and trusted colleague."

What seems to be at work in the Nate study is what Paul Prior might call "a complex of coordinated interests" which has the effect of breaking down barriers between lay and expert, allowing Nate to engage in genuine situated practice with experts as colleagues (Response 496). While such complexes are vital in that they afford the lay person the opportunity to learn through genuine routine practice, the linking of interests between lay and expert has other implications as well. The subject in Prior's study, for instance, was not permitted to progress by a successful prospectus but by a committee who at a vital juncture said "the hell with the prospectus" just "go do something" (514). All participants in this situation had an interest in making that subject's dissertation work, even in the face of that student's lack of mastery of the prospectus genre.

Significantly, Prior's study is not so much a study of one subject's development as a study of disciplinary activity. Significantly also, his work asserts a distinction between being a member of a discipline and acting as one, and this distinction between being and acting is an inherent if not overt one in most poststructuralist thought. It should not be surprising, then, that in general Prior actively situates his work in opposition to traditional linguistics, with which he equates the Nate study (Tracing 291). Prior argues that "one-way stories of assimilation into the center of a community and equally stereotyped tales of resistance belie the complexity of enculturation as practices situated within local relationships and contexts" (320). His analysis acknowledges that traditional linguistics have had a hand in shaping stereotyped tales of socialization into communities. As much as we may explicitly acknowledge conflict, power and the dynamic nature of disciplines and genres, as much as we may intend to foster a kind of cultural relativity through our research, we undercut these acknowledgements and intentions when we set out to produce sociolinguistic accounts of enculturation based on structural functionalist models of socialization which, as Glyn Williams argues, rely upon maintaining conceptions of a hierarchical social order. And it is these depictions that allow dichotomies such as the accommodation/resistance dichotomy to develop and flourish.

Complicating community entails complicating people, as well. It means not only seeing Nate as operating within a multilinguistic space, but seeing Nate as a multilinguistic space. Prior attempts to complicate people by focussing on the multiple roles people play in the university. Yet this formulation of subjectivity in terms of "role" has the drawback of calling on the same structural functionalism which supports the traditional linguistic accounts Prior criticizes. Lester Faigley argues for a poststructural treatment of the relationship between language and subject in composition research:

Understandably we as a field are reluctant to abandon the debate over initiation. To do so would entail going beyond the concept of socialization into little charted terrain where the language is murky and "off-register" if it is there at all. Prior calls his own image of disciplinarity "unsettling . . . because it puts people back in the disciplines, making it difficult to elide in any authoritative rhetoric—whether of universal clarity or community convention or discursive formation—the complex ethical, political, sociocultural and interpersonal judgments we make each day" (Response 523). Prior's image of disciplinarity reminds us that opportunities matter, that personal relationships matter, that dispositions matter, or as Nate circa 1985 put it, "that ethos and pathos matter and will continue to do so." Certainly as a graduate student Nate expressed concern with devising a method that would account for such factors in the analysis of language use. He writes in one of his self reports:

How, then, are we to regard textual acts such as the rat-in-the-box passage?

Nate's own writing, and his reflections of his writing, suggest a metaphor, if not an explanation. In his journals, he writes of a professor's comment that language would be an index of his assimilation of the scientific habit of mind: "This is almost a Frankensteinian notion of what will happen to my mind"—a characteristically sociolinguistic notion as well, I might add. The monster imagery continues in his descriptions of his academic writing: "I feel like I'm butting heads finally with ACADEMIC WRITING—and it is monstrous and unfathomable."

In fact, the equation of Nate's academic writing to Frankenstein's monster is a very appropriate one in regards to the rat-in-the-box passage. Like Frankenstein's monster, the parody is composed of bits and pieces of the rational, yet as a whole symbolizes something of the return of the repressed—the disruption of logos by ethos and pathos. Neither entirely assimilating nor entirely resisting, it at once seeks and shuns community, relentlessly eluding the grasp of the forces of social order which called it into being.

"Monsters," Donna Haraway writes, "have always defined the limits of community in Western imaginations" (180). To extend those limits beyond the dichotomous traps she sees constructed in some feminisms (e.g., public and private, nature and technology), Haraway announces a search through the discard pile of Western thought for the trickster figure that will turn these categories on their head. She finds it in a monster: the cyborg. "Not afraid of permanently partial identities and contradictory standpoints" (154) this figure demonstrates a new order of signification—one capable of suggesting what might be along with what is. In going through the discards of sociolinguistic analysis, I, too, have found a monster, but one which auspiciously points out fertile ground for research in composition: hybrid genres, "hybrid collaborative research relationships," inter- and extradisciplinary ventures and other phenomena previously regarded as idiosyncratic might become the focus of examinations which do not seek to resolve contradictions or push them to the margins. I believe that such study of such textual practices will allow for the inclusion of figures like insider/outsider, rational/irrational Nate in discussions of disciplinary activity.³