JAC Volume 9

In Reading Capital Louis Althusser cogently observes that only since Marx have we begun to suspect what reading and writing really mean. That, in short, is Ohmann’s challenge in this collection of some twenty previously published essays: to help us re-see reading and writing in the complexity of their historical and socio-political context, to problematize the hundreds of ordinary transactions of reading and writing that make up academic life, to look deeper for “alignments of interest and power.”

Ohmann passionately announced these goals in his English in America (1976). His new text is an equally inspiriting update of Ohmann’s thinking over the past decade, a time in which both literary and composition theorists, thanks to thinkers like Ohmann, have become increasingly interested in the political implications of their work. Ten years ago, Ohmann was practically a lone voice, urging writing teachers to explore the political dimensions of being situated in institutions within an advanced capitalist culture. Today, however, many composition theorists have joined Ohmann in trying to identify themselves more broadly, looking at academic discourse as more than a neutral transmitter of knowledge, as more than a value-free set of agreed upon discursive strategies. In fact, because of the influence of poststructuralism, there has also been a healthy infusion of neo-Marxist theory into English studies since 1976. Althusser and Antonio Gramsci, for example, have helped the profession understand how hegemony and ideology are day-to-day concrete realities, not esoteric abstractions. Obviously, Ohmann’s thinking has been influenced by these ideas, since he announces in his preface that he wants to interrogate the ways “domination filters through a thousand capillaries of transmission, a million habitual meanings” (xii).

Ohmann has always been interested in Marxist theory; although, like many others, his philosophical alliances are to the post-Marxists, to those who see culture, not labor, as the appropriate site for ideological struggle. Marx and Engels, of course, believed that the substructure of laws, institutions, and culture upheld and protected the economic base of the powerful, but revisionist theorists like Gramsci have examined just how sophisticated and subtle that substructure really is. The dominant class does not need to employ naked force because it has been able to “enlist almost everyone in the ‘party’ of the ruling class, set limits to debate and consciousness, and in general serve as a means of rule-that is, of preserving and reproducing class structure” (8). The implications of this notion are immense: there is no tyrant to depose and no elite to challenge, since humanist reformers, schoolteachers, and ordinary students are as much the carriers of dominant values as the wealthy and powerful. We might think we are preserving a rich literary heritage or introducing young writers into the neutral conventions of our discourse community, but in Ohmann’s more expansive political vision, educators are themselves replicating the values, beliefs, and ideas—indeed, even the rhetorical and syntactic habits—of the ruling class. We are, in short, intellectual hegemonic workers. The essays collected here develop these themes while also relating them to specific issues in reading and writing.

In “Writing and Empowerment,” for example, Ohmann describes a writing course in which students interview him and each other as a concrete way to illuminate the individual as a social construct. Writing is seen as “a dense social relation that calls into play moral judgment and a kind of politics” (255), not just rhetorical conventions or handbook rules. As in all the courses he describes, Ohmann’s writing assignments force students to re­know the world as “a process that empowers as it perplexes” (272).

Empowerment is also a focus in “Reflections on Class and Language,” in which Ohmann examines Basil Bernstein’s well-known research on language and class that produced the concepts of “elaborated” and “restricted” codes. Ohmann critiques Bernstein’s controversial conclusions on the difficulty working-class students have learning the more abstract, subordinated, complex, and context-free discourse of the middle class. While Bernstein does seem vulnerable to charges of reifying class and minimizing the dynamic historical processes involved, Ohmann objects most dramatically to the “habits of expressive power Ithat] come with actual shared power, not with computerized instruction in sentence combining or with a back-to-basics movement that would freeze students’ language into someone else’s rules, imposed from without” (293). This is difficult to disagree with, but Ohmann, unfortunately, does not address the more perplexing question of how much to respect the language of working-class students and how much it needs to be changed to avoid powerlessness. Respecting a student’s linguistic resources is both ethically correct and pedagogically effective, but, as Gramsci reminds us, there are many limitations to the contradictory consciousnesses of the working class. Ohmann’s conclusion that true worker democracy will encourage more “elaborated codes” is more inspirational than pragmatic since the problematic question is how to transcend yet value marginalized discourse.

In two essays previously published in College English, “Literacy, Technology, and Monopoly Capital,” and “Use Definite, Specific, Concrete Language,” Ohmann perceptively problematizes two givens in composition studies: that literacy is liberating, and that using concrete, specific language makes writing better. In the first of these articles, Ohmann argues that questions of literacy and technology are “inextricable from political questions of domination and equality” (215). It follows, then, that literacy should not be seen as an invariant skill, but as an activity that becomes real only in the context of class conflict and social relations. Ohmann casts a jaundiced eye on theories and programs that begin at the top of the social or academic hierarchy; he suspects that their hegemonic purpose, unconscious or not, will be to reproduce class, as they demand that “all kids act out the morality play of literacy instruction, from which the moral drawn by most will be that in this meritocracy they do not merit much” (228).

In the other College English article, Ohmann deconstructs a cliché, turning it into a penetrating example of Althusser’s contention that the values of the dominant ideology are mirrored in all discourse. Most writing teachers ask their students to illustrate their generalizations with concrete, specific language. Perhaps Christensen’s cumulative sentence, with phrases and clauses added on to a base clause, is the epitome of this stylistic technique. But Ohmann sees not more lively prose; he sees a valorizing of inconsistent and myopic world views, a refusal to interrogate one’s assumptions in favor of concrete, dilettantish chatter. Like Ann Berthoff, Ohmann wants more inquiring generalizations, not more highlighting of thingness. Probably stemming from the Marxist contention that the workings of monopoly capitalism are so subtly masked that they almost defy detection, Ohmann critiques solipsistic specificity as yet another illustration of how innocently humanists encourage students “to accept the empirical fragmentation of consciousness that passes for common sense in our society, and hence to accept the society itself as just what it most superficially seems to be” (250). Along with Wallace Stevens, Ohmann would “Let the lamp affix its beam” and “let be be finale of seem.”

It is hard to imagine a committed writing teacher who would not find these literate essays both compelling and provocative. Ohmann’s struggle against hegemonic thinking as it manifests itself in our verbal culture makes our work as writing teachers seem even more politically and intellectually vital. He shows us that we have important work to do in the world.