JAC Volume 21 Issue 3

In "`Hands-Up, You're Free': Composition in a Post-Oedipal World," Thomas Rickert works through the many paradoxical implications of progressive pedagogies that call on students to criticize authority under circumstances that make such writing "forms of adherence to authority" (300). Rickert is particularly concerned about approaches that privilege the categories of race, gender, and class, arguing that "composition in a post-oedipal world" must "take on the responsibility that comes with the impossibility of knowing the areas of contention and struggle that will be the most important in our students' lives" (290-91). Rickert also criticizes approaches that "rely on modernist strategies of critical distance or political agency" because these approaches presuppose a disciplinary society whose institutions can be analyzed and transformed while our postmodern circumstances, he argues, are "no longer organized primarily through institutions to produce compliant, useful, and productive bodies" (290, 289). Already noncompliant, "post-oedipal" students have shown little interest in the promise of empowerment through critique because, in part, this is a "modernist approach" that attempts to "re-oedipalize" them through a "pedagogy of control" (291, 292).

Among the many interesting and hard questions that follow from Rickert's analysis is one that focuses on how writing can be taught so that students experience the "inventive possibilities already inherent in post-oedipal subjectivities" rather than just cynically going through "their liberatory motions" (291-92, 300). Rickert's answer to this question revolves around the notion of writing as a risky, transgressive act. Such an act disrupts the prevailing pedagogical fantasy that "if you are critical of power, you will be empowered." This fantasy, he argues, reinscribes students in a pedagogy of control through a predetermined discursive field and is conducive to cynicism and reaction. In contrast, relinquishing control of a critical agenda designed "for the student's own good," an instructor can create the possibility for acts of risky writing that transform "the entire discursive field that determines what is proper and valued" (312). Such acts can teach an instructor to care about the students' own sites of struggle—their importance and value. Writing the act shares with punk rock "a surprising reinvention of the ordinary, the trivial, and the marginal" which, as Andrew Ross explains, "is creatively transformed into a volatile micropolitics" (112).

More than anything else Rickert says about a pedagogy for writing the act, more than his emphasis on it as "an exhortation to dare, to invent, to create, to risk," more than his recognition of it as "unorthodox, unexpected, or troublesome work," his emphasis on the act as a "volatile micropolitics" distinguishes this writing as a rhetorical event (314). Asserting their presence as historical subjects in a network of discursive practices, active writers demand from their instructors a commensurate response. Student writing thus takes a more genuinely transitive form than is customary and demands that the instructor read as an active historical subject in an actual literate event.

In the process of making a case for writing the act, Rickert raises the example of David Bartholomae who took eighteen years to figure out the "volatile micropolitics" of a paper he received as a novice instructor. In "The Tidy House," Bartholomae offers a more adequate response to what he calls Quentin Pierce's "Fuck You" paper than he was prepared to make at the time he received it. "In a sense," Bartholomae writes, "I did not know how to read it. I could only ignore it" (6). Working with Bartholomae's response to Quentin's disturbing, fragmentary text, Rickert wisely begins to question the extent to which writing the act differentiates between papers or constitutes a way of reading all student writing:

As much as I regret that Rickert's final metaphor recalls the well-known inaugural address of the senior George Bush, the point he makes represents a crucial self-correction. Without this correction, the binary drift of his key terms (oedipal/post-oedipal; modern/postmodern; subservient/transgressive) threatens to revive that other binary pair, master/student, with the master as judge of which students are authentic risk-takers and which are not. Unfortunately, Rickert's self-correction is not followed by an examination of how one might "recognize" those "active moments" that "are already present in student writing." This is work that I am interested in and that I have pursued at some length (see Working Theory). Rather than reconstructing the theoretical framework I have used for reading the inherent micropolitics in student writing, I have chosen in this response to try to pick up where Rickert leaves off, trying on his terms and seeing where they take me in my own understanding of the student writing I have received.

I am especially interested in this effort because the one student paper cited in Rickert's essay, the one by Quentin Pierce, does not actually emerge from the critical pedagogy that is so much the focus of Rickert's critique. In "The Tidy House: Basic Writing in the American Curriculum," Bartholomae explains that Pierce's paper comes from the first course he ever taught, a course he was arbitrarily assigned after he asked the chair of his department for a chance to teach before finishing graduate school (5). In this sense, Quentin's "act" neither supports nor refutes Rickert's argument that cultural studies pedagogies have failed to stimulate students to write their own act. That Rickert claims that "Quentin refuses to find his writing act empowering" presupposes that empowerment was Bartholomae's goal, which it was not. About that first course, Bartholomae writes, "By some poor luck of the draw, about half of my students were students who we would now call `basic writers.' I knew from the first week that I was going to fail them" (5). Without examining any student writing that comes from a deliberate critical pedagogy, Rickert can have it both ways, arguing that critical pedagogies need to be changed because they re-oedipalize students but that in the final analysis "inventive resistance to control is always happening" and that we should not design new pedagogies to elicit it; rather, we should learn to read for it. I cannot solve the problems raised by these somewhat different positions; however, I can slide into the gap created by them and look at a paper that I would say emerges from a better version of critical pedagogy than what Rickert imagines in his representation of politically correct composition instruction.

"Father's Shadow" was written by a student I'll call "John White." It was written in response to an assignment asking students to develop a complex portrait of someone they knew or a complex analysis of cause in relation to an event they had questions about. This inquiry assignment followed work on two essays in Bartholomae and Petrosky's Ways of Reading: Paul Auster's "Portrait of an Invisible Man" and John Edgar Wideman's "Our Time." Auster and Wideman grapple, respectively, with the meaning of a father's death and a brother's crime using methods that could be said to enact what Rickert calls "post-oedipal forms of subjectivity" that "circumvent, forestall, or resist the replication of authoritarian or proto-violent modes of control" over their subjects—subjects who were themselves damaged by these modes (307). Students were asked to consider the uses to which they might put these methods in order to reconsider people and events in their own lives.

Upon completion of these complex portraits or complex causalities, the students (using pseudonyms) gathered their work into a class book that they then read and wrote about, choosing sets of papers whose relations to one another they found significant. This approach, I believe, resembles Rickert's recommendation that we "acknowledge that we do not always know best how to rectify social problems for [students], and . . . that we partially relinquish control to, and learn from, students." Such an approach, which Rickert calls "the next step for writing pedagogy," strikes me as already pretty well established, my reference to Ways of Reading being the most superficial marker of this acceptance. Still, the course is fraught with the contradictions of critical pedagogy that Rickert describes. On the one hand, as Rickert says, "content and methodology become intermeshed with student knowledges and experiences"; on the other, this knowledge and experience, as the students well know, will be assessed by the instructor for the quality of its questioning practices (291). What is different from the pedagogies that Rickert criticizes is that the essays by Auster and Wideman include passages where they agonize over the contradictory power relations that shape their discourse. Neither rising above nor capitulating to authoritative discourse relations, Auster and Wideman just keep working, trying one thing, trying another. In this way, they enact an attitude that could be said to illustrate what Rickert calls "the inventive possibilities . . . of post-oedipal subjectivities" that some students, I think, hear as requiring neither cynical aloofness nor slavish accommodation to the fantasy that this writing is for their own good (291-92). It is then up to the instructor to read, and to teach the students to read for, those passages that probe and challenge discourse relations of inevitability whatever the site of contention. In John White's paper, we have a chance to see what such a passage might look like and what we might learn about pedagogy from a reading of the micropolitics in his work.

Like many students in the class, John chooses to follow Auster's lead and to write about his father, asking himself and others in his family why his father is so angry. The inquiry he has chosen is both difficult and risky, as he explains in the opening paragraphs:

In this opening, we learn that John is worried about "going behind his father's back." As if this is not burden enough, he also expresses concern that he must somehow meet the expectations of two conflicting rhetorics: the stated one that teaches that meaning is multiple and situational; the unstated one (which is the real one to him) that teaches that meaning is singular and fixed. This student, it would seem, is positioned where Rickert predicts that critical pedagogies will place him: in the impossible position of having to write a good, unified, college-level paper in a way that demonstrates that he has been liberated from unity's restrictions. However, another way of reading this opening is that John White (same first name and last initial as John Wideman) is mulling over his difficult situation, neither as a demonstration of his liberation nor of his subservience but as a blunt description of his difficult situation in which he may instead see where an active acknowledgment might take him. This stance resembles that of both Auster and Wideman. I am inclined toward this second, more promising reading, not only because it is in my interest, but also because it seems justified by what follows in the next six and one-half pages.

Consider, for instance, a long paragraph about halfway through the paper, one that pursues John's key question about his father: "why he has such a temper." Up to this point, John has revealed that his father, who was raised in "Europe," had a tyrannical father who expected his son to become a veterinarian. (He does not name the country, Poland, in order to retain anonymity in the class book.) Reacting against his father's control, John's father joined the navy and became an electrical engineer. Away much of the time, he nevertheless maintained fierce expectations that his son excel in school, leading John to fear school because he "had to get good grades." Pursuing this line of thought at some length, John would appear to have explained a great deal about the way angry fathers can reproduce themselves in their sons. Having adequately fulfilled a conflict-producing assignment, one might conclude that if John were responding to this assignment only as a subservient demonstration of current critical methods, he would now be able to stop. But he does not stop. Instead he goes on to write many more pages, including the following paragraph that recalls features of writing "the act" that Rickert describes. Pinpointing his father's favorite expression—"Don't try to make a fool out of me"— John shines a red laser on valued language in his father's discursive field:

In this paragraph, John teaches the reader to hear and to care about the micropolitics of the cliché he grew up with. What persuades me to represent this work as a "reinvention of the ordinary" is the extent to which John's way of telling this story makes it possible for a reader to do precisely what Rickert says critical pedagogies fail to do—make one "see and care about injustice" (298). In this case, the injustices are multiple, including those inflicted on his father by his grandfather and those inflicted on him and his sister by their father. "Students must sooner or later overcome us," writes Rickert (291). In succeeding to teach what critical pedagogies cannot teach by virtue of their authority-bound condition, White has disrupted the pedagogical discursive field along with the familial discursive field. It is to the latter that I will now turn.

In the paragraph by White above, there are four repetitions of his father's key phrase. In the first reference, White reports his mother explaining its origin: "She said that my grandfather told my dad never to let anyone make a fool out of him." The second time that White uses this phrase he reports his own experience: "Throughout his life I kept hearing him say, `don't let anyone make a fool out of me,' even though no one was trying it." In that critical final clause, White begins to construct his work as a risky act, as Rickert says, in that he "disrupts the exchange circuit on which successful communication [from father to son] depends" (310). Disrupting normal communication, White goes on to see his father's warning in terms of hierarchical power relations, and he sees his father as a subject structured by these relations. In other words, he begins to hear his father's individual speech ideologically, while at the same time demonstrating great feeling for his father's situation, as the third iteration of the phrase demonstrates: "I guess the `don't let anyone make a fool out of you' turned him against people and made him be in constant fear that people want to be better than him and put him down. For that reason I think he wants to show that he is better, and if he can't he tries to find things that are wrong." Having disrupted normal reception to the extent that he now hears his father's speech as a discourse, White is then able to hear other things his father says as part of this discursive field: "`I could have made this better myself.' Those were his words when my sister's furniture was delivered one day."

In contrast to Quentin Pierce, White's disruption of normal communication appears to stimulate fluency and extend his thought. Associating his father's customary warning with the different comment about his sister's furniture, White, I would argue, risks looking like a fool to his readers. The anecdote about the furniture is banal; the connection could be misunderstood; everyone in the class might laugh at the homely detail. Still, he goes forward with it, and without trying, convinces the reader that he is different from his father, as he claims, for the simple fact that he goes further than he needs to in making his point and incurs the risk of looking foolish. Furthermore, where a simple oppositional stance would reattach him to his father's authority, White's conclusion about his relation to his father does something else, something riskier. It takes him farther than his own perception of micropolitics can accommodate; that is, it is inventive enough to elude his complete control. I observe this slippage at the end where he begins to notice that his analysis cannot explain why he is different from his father if his father is not different from his grandfather. The need for macropolitics, for cultural studies, so to speak, slides in nonauthoritatively. Active writing is acting on the writer, and thus the paragraph ends not with a "uniform, clear picture" but with a conundrum: "What would make him be that way? Can a father have so much influence on a son? I myself have heard my father say "don't let anyone make a fool out of you,' but it never stays in my mind."

Rickert writes that pedagogy should make it possible for students to name their sites of contention. By partially relinquishing control to students, we can learn from them (291). He also argues that transgressive writing acts are already present in our students' writing as "tiny resistances" that we need to recognize (315). Putting this together, we see that reading the act requires that we must learn from our students what constitutes a risky or troublesome inquiry for them. This is much more difficult than it sounds and constitutes risky reading on our part. For instance, in the process of writing this response, I have come to understand how "John White" succeeded in disrupting my normal reading with his act. Two-thirds of the way through my first draft, I noticed that I had stopped referring to my former student as "John" and had begun calling him by his surname, "White," extending to him the same stature I had given Rickert and Bartholomae. I have decided not to correct this inconsistency, but to retain it as a marker of the way my authoritative relationship with John White's work was altered. In this small, unconscious shift, I recognize the micropolitics of reading the act that, in addition to writing the act, is necessary if composition is to "resist projects of re-oedipalization" (292).