Rhetorics, Poetics and Cultures is for me most valuable as an account of the "whys" and "hows" of Jim Berlin's classroom practice: his last book describes his articulation of cultural studies and composition studies for graduate students at Purdue as they both study rhetorical history and teach introductory writing. It is that articulation that I'll examine in this essay—beginning with a brief and selective definition of the term. In Birmingham School cultural theory, "articulation" is construed as an active process through which meaning is expressed in local and contingent ways: in a specific context, at a specific historical moment, within a specific discourse. Thus articulation is both a saying and a connecting. It describes an enactment of meaning, while simultaneously connecting that meaning to multiple discursive systems. In recent discussions, the term has been used to point to acts of enunciating connections between and among gender, race, class and sexual orientation as well as to intersections between and among disciplinary inquiries.

But to call an "articulation" project merely an "inter-" or "multi-disciplinary" inquiry would be to miss the point. Articulation becomes necessary precisely because disciplines—institutions that see only what they recognize no matter where they look—will necessarily repress or ignore some crucial aspect of the job that cultural studies is designed to do. A disciplinary study that focuses on class, for example, risks blurring race and gender; a writing program that construes writing only as communicative behavior risks occulting the ways in which "good" writing is an effect of class. Fredric Jameson describes articulation as "a punctual and sometimes even ephemeral totalization," in which several institutional formations come together, but only for a moment, to express a meaning for a specific set of circumstances ("Cultural Studies," 32). (Conceptions from film studies, anthropology, sociology, feminism, and queer studies, for example, articulate momentarily to describe the representation of "family" in the film Father's Day; while nonetheless rejecting the universalizing gestures of disciplinarity that would turn them into a method.) In lieu of methodological instructions, Jameson offers a trope. "Articulation," he writes, "is like a turning molecular structure, an ion exchange between various entities, in which the ideological drives associated with one pass over and interfuse the other" a short-lived chemical compound that has to be used before it disintegrates ("Cultural Studies," 32).

Beginning with "Rhetoric and Ideology in the Writing Class," Jim Berlin's work might be understood as a series of attempts to articulate a Birmingham School electron into the epistemic rhetoric molecule. His legacy has been to bring together the institutional formations of cultural studies and composition studies such that they could speak to each other (articulate in the sense of enunciating their disparate projects)and fit together (articulate in the sense of joining different parts). In a recent essay, I pointed out how formidable that project actually is, because both composition studies and cultural studies are multifarious institutional formations which are themselves comprised of many disciplinary constructions. Further, Jim's project was not only to imagine a linkup for composition studies and cultural studies but also to make this hybrid into a pedagogy—more precisely, to discern the pedagogy that his hybrid implies. Further, to the extent that his articulation orients itself toward agency, the project needs to be further informed by attention to race, gender, class and affectional preference. I list them separately (rather than as part of the disciplinary apparatus of Cultural Studies) because it seems to me that they are cultural facts as well as disciplinary terms, so they make as it were a fourth dimension of the problematic.

Given this complexity, it's not surprising that Jameson calls "articulation . . . the central theoretical problem or conceptual core of Cultural Studies" ("Cultural Studies," 32). Moreover, Jameson asserts that although articulation is "exemplified over and over again . . . [it is] less often foregrounded as such" ("Cultural Studies," 32). An exemplification does an articulation project—shows, for example, how subjectivities, values and knowledges are discursively constructed; a foregrounding stipulates and explains why and how disparate systems are connected so as to accomplish a given goal. Foregrounding emphasizes praxis—in this case, the generalized account of specific linkups that explains why Jim Berlin made the choices he did and how he fit together the theories of rhetoric, of culture, of reading, of semiotics, of ideology, of pedagogy, and of composing for students and teachers of Introductory Writing at Purdue. A foregrounded articulation shows how theories of writing and of culture are connected—what their connections can accomplish and how, and what they occult or slight, and how. One of the reasons why articulation is so rarely foregrounded, I think, is that its projects are both so complicated (a totalization) and so short-lived (punctual and ephemeral).

I'll try briefly to foreground the articulation that Jim's first year writing course "Codes and Critiques" exemplified. Jim wrote about the theory and the practice of his articulation process. Berlin's theory of rhetoric is his own—the social epistemic rhetoric that seeks to explain how cultural forces enact and even determine our perceptions of "what exists, what is good, what is possible." He acknowledges the sources of his cultural studies thought in the work of the Birmingham School. In the work of Raymond Williams, Richard Hoggart and Stuart Hall, among others, he found an emphasis on the lived experience of ordinary people as well as a profound suspicion of the traditional English department hierarchies that privilege reading over writing and reception over production just as capital is privileged over labor. For an account of ideology, he went to Goran Therborn, whose "method [Jim wrote] is at every turn rhetorical, by which I mean that he considers ideology in relation to communicators, audiences, formulations of reality, and the central place of language in all of these" (78). Fredric Jameson's the Political Unconscious provided a hermeneutic—"a method of reading" of multiple "interpretive horizons" whose "purpose is to discover the way in which a text . . . offers an imaginary resolution of a real contradiction" (107,77). Like Jameson, Berlin went to Levi-Strauss for a way of describing cultural contradictions as part of a binary system that "govern[s] the behavior of a culture in its everyday operations" (59). These several formations gave him a way of accounting for the production of discourse, and a way of reading the discourses that shape our lives. What he did not yet have—or what he had not yet made explicit—was a theory of composing—a way of explaining to students how they should go about producing discourse.

Part of a theory of composing can be inferred, I think from the practice Jim describes in "Codes and Critiques." Jim gave students a heuristic that prompted them to find cultural contradictions that they would not otherwise perceive. When they followed it, they were expected to encounter what Janice Lauer calls "cognitive dissonance." Like Lauer, Jim saw invention as emerging from dissonance, and therefore he used cultural contradictions specifically to produce or engender that feeling. The teacher's role, for Jim, was that of problem poser, "providing methods for questioning that locate the points of conflict and contradiction" (102). Issues of class, race and gender would emerge, he said, as a part of class discussions. Students would record their differing descriptions, analyses, and explanations in their writing. These "responses [he writes] were at the center of classroom activity" (115). Issues of arrangement and genre would emerge from these varying responsive invention processes.

As Jim himself somewhat ruefully admitted, these procedures were not entirely successful. Often, he told us in person and in print, students construed Jim's carefully engendered "dissonance" merely as an obstacle to be overcome as they struggled to become a productive member of a capitalist economy. The students Jim dealt with are, by and large, products of a homogeneous, rural, politically and religiously conservative culture.

My mentees and I have named this typical student the "postmodern Hoosier rhetor." It is hard for her to see the racial and class based contradictions on which Jim's pedagogy was based, and even her perceptions of gender are likely to be very traditional. On the other hand, she is bombarded daily with the unresolved narratives of "Friends" and "Seinfeld," the constructed subjectivities of "Singled Out" and the talk shows, the fragmentation of MTV and the Soaps. Even though she might tell you that she was "raised" with master narratives about good and evil, conservatives and liberals, she is very much aware of and inured to the contradictions of postmodernity. When the postmodern Hoosier rhetor has a contradiction pointed out to her, then, she is less likely to contemplate the cognitive dissonance as a spur to invention and more likely simply to say "whatever." And since Jim's method calls for students to arrive at genre as a function of their invention processes, the pomo Hoosier rhetor reinvents the "what ever" genre—the essay that concludes by asserting that "everyone is entitled to their own opinion"—the very kind of writing that we hoped cultural studies would eliminate.

At Purdue we continue to work at developing ways of confronting the pomo "whatever" as a problem for invention. As we do, we are very much aware of the giant's shoulders on which we have stood to perceive it.