I had a concern as I read Jim Berlin's "Closing Word" in Rhetorics, Poetics, and Cultures. I'm one of the few fans of Ian Hunter's Culture and Government in English Studies, so I was understandably thrilled that Jim relies on Hunter in this brief closing. Jim places his entire book's argument in the context of Hunter's case that English studies is powerfully and precisely devoted to installing in students a particular kind of self-monitorial, "schooled" subject position. English teaches its students to oppose their perceptions to a structure of self-correction and doubt, by means of its subtle approval and disapproval of their modes of interpretation. Jim says that Hunter's description of this practice fits his own critique of expressivist writing classes, where students' supposedly "real" personal voices appear after their teachers and better-schooled classmates name unacceptable responses as inauthentic, not "genuine." English teachers, Jim infers from Hunter's and his analyses, are thus responsible for, have power over, consciousness formation. Jim's closing then also calls for explicit classroom attention to exposing this powerful teaching practice in English, for telling students how English creates the internalized self-monitor, a schooled conscience, that separates their multiple, often split, immediate responses from the normalized thinking that wins them approval.

As I said, I was thrilled by this concluding revelation of how schooling in language produces normalized but always self-conflicted "real selves." Jim reasons here that when we teach differentially valued interpretations, we must focus both on letting students in on how institutions form subjects who always doubt themselves, and on choosing the content of courses in light of a tremendous social responsibility.

But I was, as I said, also concerned. It is not obvious to me that institutional claims to teach a universal moral sense should supplant families, regional customs, class, or ethnic politics, to normalize and covertly coerce conscience, nor that institutions can or should install a universal vision of "democratic" subjectivity. It is not necessarily positive that the teacherly subject position needed to accomplish this social work must simulate parents and thereby infantilize students, as I argue whenever I have a chance. When students must learn to frame every experience in dual perspectives—their own and the iconic English teacher's—the end result is a culture in which it is difficult to share an elevator with Native Americans without coding them as "Other," or to work for females without measuring them against "real" women, or to meet any student without immediately assuming that I have much to teach. Jim equates this habit of judgment, this internalized duality, with the "consciousness" that is the recurring theme in his positive programs for teaching, research, and a reformed English studies. While Hunter objects to the mass control of an educational technology that estranges students from unrefereed desires and from action, Jim urges that we tell students that we have this power. Yet his book's descriptions of actual teaching perpetuate this covert practice. Despite its closing use of Hunter and other emerging changes in his work, his class plans were chaperoned by doctrinaire leftism, which calls its political opposition victims of an "inauthentic" false consciousness—that is, of faulty interpretations.

In this book's descriptions of courses in cultural awareness, for instance, Jim rarely discusses acts of writing without using a fatherly imperative voice. He often says that students as readers discover, discuss, become aware, and reflect. But he says that students as writers "must" learn, "must" see, "must" identify and enact, and "must be made" aware. Student readers are teachable, that is, easily led into self- and cultural reflection, and into debates about the media's classed and sexed binaries. But as student writers, they only compose exercises in order to reflect on or display their grasp of democratic consciousness. In these model classes, their writing is not positioned to enact that consciousness because they, as writers, are not taught that they have the power to do so.

I think that Jim would have read by now John Guillory's Cultural Capital, which implies an alternative to fatherly pride in managing students' interiors, the work that I fear is still the central goal of composition teaching. Guillory's thesis is that it is not interpretation or ideology that determines students' politics or their political power. Instead, uneven access to means of literate/literary production—to making powerful language, not to reading it—now and always determines uneven class and social status, and thus also determines the possibility that specific student classes will actually intervene in uneven social arrangements. Guillory also argues that composition has replaced interpretative studies as the cultural site of discriminatory allotments of this access to political action. Composition now produces, he says, the distinction between basic and more elite language, produces the stratified ideological identity of the politically effective sociolect, and produces both its pretensions to universality and its power to make the medium of political discourse available. Guillory believes that students who can identify with those who make consequential language determine power relations, not those who interpret through an institutionally installed ideological consciousness.

My version of this claim is to argue for enabling students to act through language, first by placing its differential modes of making in the center of our teaching, as Jim suggested. By teaching texts rather than their making, by teaching awareness rather than rhetoric, and by teaching the power of meanings rather than the making of statements, we inadvertently reproduce a politics that is aware but passive. Rhetoric is not, that is, semiotics. And while it often suits us to equate the two (for reasons related more to professional politics than to democracy), writing is not reading.

I worry, consequently, about composition courses that frame student writing in imperatives to reflect. The content of such courses is not writing—is not persuasion to assume the positions of those whose acts of writing are interventions. Nor is it systematic demonstrations of how to write—not "well," but powerfully, to subvert more and less conventional subject positions. Writing taught as reading, that is, accomplishes political stasis. Courses in reading culture produce what conservatives call liberal armchair Marxism, a hermeneutics of suspicion. They appear to raise the prestige of their teachers, but they do not in fact accomplish that, nor create students who are entitled to write, as we see from their results.

I shared with Jim a pronounced tendency to avoid middle roads, the liberal positions that now determine the interest of English studies in newly diversified reading. Our shared goals are certainly why Jim's book wants to refigure English. But our mutual wish to learn how to use the active power of language also causes my concern. The students Jim portrays as needing consciousness are not directed toward practice in manipulating genres, but to a smart awareness of generic power; not toward guerrilla stylistics, but to savvy about stylishness; not toward strength to withstand forces that prevent their critiques from wide acknowledgment, but to interpretations of these forces. Yet culture as an object of study—no matter how it is studied—no more motivates active literate practices than does reading great literature.

I agree with Jim's closing: English studies remains the most powerful site of cultural reproduction, because it covertly installs a difference between schooled and unschooled perspectives in the name of a particular morality. But I want to add that if we teach the masses in the name of democratic virtue, we must actually privilege a dose of vulgar composition—how to find and fulfill a textual purpose for a specific readership, in full awareness that safe purposes and already socialized results are already waiting to choose us. If our courses are to undo, not perpetuate, the political silence of the individualistic "I am" that composition now supports, they should focus on what powerful writers know and do. They should not, that is, distance students from an ineffable "authorship," nor focus on what English teachers want students to "think" about the readings they now teach.

Younger scholars and graduate students in composition may think it exclusionary to urge more focused meetings of College Composition and Communication, more research reports that offer "news" about writing practices and processes, more empirical but not positivist studies of writing development, and more attempts to re-theorize the purposes and results of specific textual conventions in prose discourse. But Jim and I also shared a professional history in which we and many others were shunned, professionally insulted, denied tenure, and, like the suicidal dentist in the movie "MASH," accused of having wasted our entire educations. We were subtly yet coercively begged to forego writing for reading. That history may explain why current composition has turned to cultural hermeneutics to give its work, and its workers, professional parity. But the field's troubles did not occur because people like us disliked literature or those who teach it. We do not. They resulted instead from an early insistence that our courses and our research are about writing, not interpretation, conscious or not.