JAC Volume 19 Issue 4

I remember reading Wimsatt and Beardsley's "The Intentional Fallacy" during my first year of graduate school in the early 1980s and feeling grateful to have finally encountered the argument behind an unspoken assumption that apparently informed most of my English teachers in high school and college--namely, that an author's intentions were beside the point. From an interpretive position, this view seemed to make sense: given that the reader is cut off from the writer by time and space (and often by the latter's death), authorial intentions--particularly in the case of ambiguous literary texts--is not merely difficult to posit, it is also impossible to know for sure. While I soon thereafter encountered various structuralist and post-structuralist challenges to the New Critical perspectives with which Wimsatt and Beardsley were identified, there was little on the theoretical landscape (or in the classroom, where expressions such as "what the text seems to suggest" and "what the text would have us believe" were constantly employed by teacher and student alike) that urged that we pay heed to writerly intention. Indeed, book reviewers, professors, or graduate students who still worried over intention were sometimes seen as backward--apparently unaware of what Barthes, with characteristic panache, had termed "the death of the author."

English studies has obviously changed in certain respects since that time. Issues of agency, for instance, have formed a significant area of scholarly concern throughout the past decade, and I imagine that (as in my own case) many now consider somewhat misguided their earlier attraction to theories for which the author was of no consequence. But by no means has the concept of intention fully recovered from the many assaults it suffered during the course of the past century, and this is but one of the reasons why Arabella Lyon's Intentions: Negotiated, Contested, and Ignored, winner of the 1998 W. Ross Winterowd Award, is such a necessary and timely contribution both to English studies in general and to rhetorical theory in particular. Struck by the ways in which the turn toward hermeneutics in rhetorical theory has recently led the field to focus on interpretation at the expense of production, Lyon calls for a new understanding of intention, which she believes can help rhetoric renew its public function and its commitment to producing social and political change. Lyon is determined to present rhetoric as deliberative rather than merely interpretive, and to my mind this is one of the most invigorating aspects of her book. "Rhetoric," she contends, "is not just about conflict, but about the dialectical means of finding justified action." Lyon wants to see rhetoric work free of its textualist tendencies-to rediscover the more contestatory and civic side of its history and identity. Moreover, she wants rhetoric to recognize the vital contribution it might make to democratic politics, where Enlightenment values and a fixation on consensus have led our nation into an impoverished understanding of difference. In other words, though its focus on intention may initially seem to cover a rather narrow terrain, Lyon's study holds serious implications not only for disciplinary rhetoric but also for public deliberation in a multicultural society.

Intriguingly, Lyon demonstrates that rhetoric fails to adequately theorize intention precisely because intention serves as one of rhetoric's most deeply held assumptions about discourse. With its emphasis on communication, oral practice, effect, and occasion, rhetoric historically imagines intention as a given. But as Lyon observes, granting intention this privileged position has unfortunately lead rhetoric to place intention beyond controversy and therefore beyond analysis--that is, until in recent years when rhetoric began looking to interpretive theory for inspiration. Lyon examines this development by devoting the first two chapters of her book to an insightful critique of some of the most visible figures in twentieth-century rhetoric (Richards, Booth, and Fish in chapter one, followed by Gadamer and Mailloux in chapter two), all of whom are concerned with but nevertheless underestimate the complexities of intention. While criticism of the first three figures might be expected, the resistance to Gadamer (or even to Mailloux, for that matter) comes as a surprise--and ultimately proves enlightening. Lyon argues that, for all its value, Gadamer's congenial model of discursive exchange is far more descriptive of literary interpretation than of the agonistic public sphere, where audiences often have good reason to resist the rhetorics they encounter and to preserve their vital differences from others. To insist, as Gadamer does, that readers shift their horizons is to overlook the cultural and political contexts in which the refusal to give up one's views is an important source of power and group solidarity.

Given her attention to the complexity of discourse, it is fitting that Lyon's own theory of intention draws heavily upon the work of Kenneth Burke, whom she calls the "prime protagonist" of her book. By explicating and extending Burke's concepts of form, motive, and purpose, Lyon paints a detailed portrait of the ways that intentions coalesce not only in individual subjects but also in the structure of their language and the culture they inhabit (or are inhabited by). For Lyon, as for Burke, the subject is inescapably a "partial agent," one whose personal intentions are always in dialogue with a larger system of cultural intentions: "The motives of the society are dependent upon, defined by, and developed in the agent's act, just as the agent and act, in turn, are dependent upon, defined by, and developed in the cultural motive." Part of the value of Lyon's book lies in her insistence that, however complicated this relationship between agent and culture, we still manage to recognize intentions, which do not disappear just because various attempts to explain how they work (speech act theory, for example) tend to oversimplify them.

What may strike some readers as more problematic is Lyon's decision to dedicate the entire second half of her book to a close investigation of responses to the early and later works of Wittgenstein. Given the excitement generated by ideas in the first three chapters, we can imagine the book looking to a more public and less textualist space--perhaps something more closely associated with the contemporary university or with current political conflict. But as it turns out, the turn to Wittgenstein proves worthwhile, even if its disciplinary focus makes it appear not entirely compatible with the direction Lyon seems to be heading in early on. In a book about intentions, one should surely listen to what the author has to say about her own, and Lyon justifies the focus on Wittgenstein by noting that "it is because the political difficulties of multiculturalism, diversity, and power differentials inhabit even disciplined discourses that I turn to philosophy." Indeed, Lyon goes on to demonstrate how Wittgenstein's intentions have often been ignored by professional philosophers, whose disciplinary allegiances tend to close down the process of open deliberation that Wittgenstein sought to create through his negatives, narratives, and metaphors. These chapters are well worth the reader's effort, and they provide a detailed illustration of the ways in which readers as well as writers bring intentions to the text.

Yet, I suspect that the value of this book for teachers of writing will come not from the example provided by Wittgenstein, but from the questions Lyon's conception of rhetoric raises about our current composition curriculum. Though Lyon does not explicitly discuss the composition classroom, I found myself rethinking my teaching as I moved through her book, and I imagine that many readers of this journal are likely to do the same. In the space that remains, I want to consider a few of the curricular practices that Intentions challenges us, albeit implicitly, to reexamine.

First and foremost among these practices is our habit of locating intention primarily--and often solely--within the mind of the writer. One of the salient components of Lyon's theory lies in its refusal to relinquish an individual author's intentions; yet, at the same time, Lyon complicates our understanding of intention by showing how intentionality inheres as much in genre and culture as it does in particular people. Moreover, Lyon observes that these multiple layers of intention are often in conflict with one another, thereby producing ambiguous, paradoxical, or contradictory texts. Applying this insight to the composition class, we might see such moments of conflict in student texts as something considerably more complex (and potentially more productive) than mere lapses into inconsistency. Rather than presuming a kind of one-way street running from students' intentions to their texts, we need to look for, and help students to look for, the ways in which their subjective intentions as writers encounter, shape, and get shaped by various generic and cultural intentions that precede them. In other words, we need to ask students not only the obvious question "What did you intend to say?" but also the more awkward and thorny questions, such as "What does this kind of language intend you to say?" and "Where does your text reveal intentions belonging not so much to you as to cultural forces speaking through you?" While social constructionism has pointed composition in this direction for a number of years, Lyon's theory of intention offers us a way to acknowledge the cultural indebtedness of our students' writing without neglecting the push-and-pull of their sometimes vigorous agency.

As I have suggested, perhaps the most crucial element in this book is its vision of rhetoric as primarily deliberative rather than interpretive. For Lyon, deliberation means the entire process of framing issues, proffering solutions, examining reasons, responding to concerns, and deciding upon actions--in other words, a process that concludes with things getting done and not just talked about. This view of rhetoric might lead us to reimagine another common feature of composition courses, which all too often, even in their more progressive instantiations, produce discourse that exists primarily for the sake of institutional evaluation. Students write, read, and comment on each others' texts, listen to their teachers, revise, and ultimately get graded on their performances. Portfolios are compiled, judged, and retrieved--or discarded--whereupon the cycle begins again with the onset of a new semester. What I'm getting at here is that while composition courses provide practice for future writing in subsequent classrooms or careers, and while this practice may also help to develop critical thinking (however variously defined), it nevertheless seems safe to say that composition curricula continue largely to invite what Susan Miller calls "intransitive" writing--that is, writing conceived as having no real influence on an actual audience, even if those enrolled in a particular course may find it briefly engaging. The notion of student writing doing work in the world, not just doing work for a course, remains relatively foreign both to composition and to the university. Student writing, almost by definition, is writing performed as dress rehearsal: the director (and perhaps the cast itself) remarks on the good and the bad, but no one else is there to watch.

Lyon's emphasis on deliberation-culminating-in-action directs us to new possibilities. Certainly, service learning is one path for connecting students to communities beyond the classroom, but what I have in mind is something that students might explore on their own behalf, not just on behalf of others (which isn't to claim that these are mutually exclusive options). In addition to asking students to investigate the political and economic difficulties faced by those in the world around them, we might also ask them to investigate the sources of their own difficulties, their own alienation, and to use their writing not simply to reflect on this alienation but ultimately to do something about it. Reading Lyon's book, I found myself imagining a composition course in which students would identify, discuss, research, and write about whatever it is that estranges them from their own potential community, be it in the neighborhood, university, town/city, state, or nation. To take the university community as an example, I expect that students might focus on grades, course requirements, housing, food, tuition expenses, date rape, race relations, homophobia, or a number of other issues that are prevalent on college campuses these days. Part of the writing for this course would be not simply "addressed" toward those who could foster change (people already in power or people who, together, could become powerful) but actually delivered to them, either through local publications, the internet, radio announcements, posters, performances, the mail, or other avenues and media. In other words, the point of the course would be to encourage students to make their writing fully deliberative in the sense Lyon suggests, and to break free of the "letter to the editor" as the only form of action available to writers. While such a course may not be anything like what Lyon intended me to envision, what I value in her book is its ability to stimulate this kind of thinking.

Finally, I think it important to note that Lyon seems troubled (though she mentions this only in passing) by an institutional arrangement in which rhetorical and literary studies live under the same roof. Early in her book, she remarks that "when rhetoric--a potentially revolutionary study concerned with diversity and change--is allied with literary study, institutional placement mutes the study of argumentation, deliberation, radical democracy, and diversity within communities." Now, Lyon may simply be pointing to what has happened historically within English departments (in which case I agree with her); but she may also be suggesting, both here and in other brief passages, that rhetoric (and composition?) will be better off when institutionally detached from literary studies, which from her perspective works as a conservative force that drives rhetoric toward interpretive contemplation rather than deliberative action. As one who has called for a thorough integration of composition, literary study, and creative writing, I don't think English departments need (or even can, for much longer) continue to work as they have in the past, which means that institutional collaboration among various factions within the field of English might still be possible. But I must admit that Lyon's argument gives me pause, for it provides a bold conception of rhetoric whose commitment to the worldly ends of discourse may indeed prove difficult for many in literary studies to accept.

Arabella Lyon's Intentions should certainly be read for its discussion of rhetoric, philosophy, and the nuanced role of intention in each of these disciplines. But for teachers of writing it offers something more: an implicit provocation to reconceive our work in the classroom and to rehabilitate, with our students, a much-depleted public sphere.