Cinnabar and Alabaster

46. ("indefinite definition) "at the same time composition teachers and scholars are promoting collaboration inside the classroom and out, our academic institutional structures continue to punish it as a dishonorable 'giving or receiving help'"
47."it would be especially useful for the field to stablize what we mean by collaboration. however, to do this (naturally) implies a critique of the construct of collaboration that predominates now, showing it at odds with the claims for it"; "[collaboration] allows a constructivist, collective kind of knowledge-making process that is faithful to and takes advantage of a postmodern, multivocal, Bakhtinian understanding of how we 'create' knowledge" (cue reither & vipond, (neo) porter, etc.)
48. the above "could be called old style/paradigmatic collaboration: while the processes involve multiple authorship, the text itself is pretty much the same as it would be in a single authorship venture"; "when collaboration 'works,' what happens?...if it's ubiquitous, it's always working, no?"
49. from ede & lunsford y & s "get the sense of a false opposition"--"the first set of respondents were content with thier groups' focus on efficiency and division of labor--which actually belong to the hierarchical mode--while, conversely, the second set of respondents were feeling oppressed by the dialogic style of thier groups"; "if for Ede and Lunsford 'group' and 'collaborative' were not equivalent by definition, then 'dialogic' and 'hierarchical' could be seen as two modes of group writing, but 'dialogic' might be collaborative and 'hierarchical' might not--without the stigma of intellectual rigidity and interpersonal failure"
50. "what many accounts of collaborative writing don't see is that--though they lay claim to the master narrative--they don't in the specifics of their accounts support the narrative. they underscore it as mythology. for example, ownership--a rather anti-collaborative concept--still seems pretty important even to collaborative scholars"; "the practice described by many seems both celebratory of and resistant to collaboration at the same time: a reflection perhaps of what we all feel--the tug and pleasure of working together in tension with the need to recieve individual credit in a meritocracy"
52. "collaborators achieve a critical level of congruence in understanding, in purpose, and in other intellectual dimensions of a project. cooperators organize themselves differently: clear structure, division of roles, division of knowledge, efficiency--'hierarchy' in its neutral or positive dimension"; "plagiarist" alongside "ghostwriter" defined as "working 'alone' but co-opting another identity"
53. "many scholars in composition still seem to prefer a certain vagueness in the idea of community. it's as if the word has become magic: a talisman against the idea of conflict in the discipline....one would guess that this comfortable magic is also behind the interest in collaboration. and while it has brought some luck to the study of composition, it may also have kept the field from seeing value in reasonable non-collaborative models of writing"
54. "but maybe a committee...is not such a bad model" even "an appropriate model for group writing in the classroom": "the work is assigned, a deadline set from outside, an inescapable arbitrariness pervades. committees have an emotional detachment about them because they belong to the world of work"; emotional investment isn't everything, though; "composition teachers are inundated every year with student writing that is truly impassioned and truly bad"
55. "writing-for-the-teacher is your profession when you're a student, and working as a committee is an effective--even a natural--approach in a professional setting"; "we usually assign for students what Smith would call cooperative--not collavorative--work, in what Ede and Lunsford would call a hierarchical--not a dialogic--mode"; "the sense of collective" is "in our superstition: we 'see' collaboration everywhere, along with community. the trouble is that the effect of an all-inclusive definition of collaboration has been to trivialize collaboration"
56. "it has to be OK to say that these are not all 'collaborative' modes of writing"; "if our theory must call all writing collaborative, then 'collaboration' becomes moot and useless as a theoretical construct...and then this emperor has no clothes"; when the line becomes a continuum: "imagine the lone author at a given point on the circle. move in one direction...through increasingly cooperative projects, on into collaborative ones, until you reach the fulfillment of smith's 'expectation of a singular purpose and a seamless integration of the parts, as if the conceptual object were produced by a single good mind.' and where are you? back to the individual. well, not 'the' individual, but a collective one...an our/self"--"even in its collectivity, it's still a singular. the autonomous self seen through a kaleidoscope--fragmented, but composed"; & the "foregrounding difference" point: "if we aren't different, then we don't need to collaborate"
58. "in short, ironically, in spite of all, the We in collaborative scholarship is under erasure. identity is very much individualistic, the individuals and their concerns linked rather than 'collected'"; "a collaborated self wants to say with the villagers to the census-taker 'we are one.' yet--for example, by acting out the intersection of voice in the format of this paper--that self also says 'my name is Legion'"; "writing," says porter, "is an attempt to exercise the will, to identify the self within the constraints of some discourse community"
59. benjamin's word is "montage." but "no one is looking at how such different voices--the ones normally so important in collaboration of whatever variety--might be represented textually. the assumption seems [to be simply] the old genres will suffice to contain it....[but] this collective intelligence?--represented textually [might require us to] invent new genres that wouldn't contain it, might have to refigure old genres so that they couldn't contain it"
61. "if multivocal writing becomes the 'new force' that gesa kirsch predicts, it will be interesting to see what readers make of it. to see if they are annoyed at the reading work involved, or to see if they are pulled into the text--perhaps as voyeur...or as reader-chorus, or as participant....or if they find reading it difficult repcisely because this text doesn't quite fit their genre expectation"; "to expose the multiple gears and pulleys does in fact represent the collaborative process, and it should work in part to remind readers of their own contribution to meanings made. multiplicity, transaction, community, intertextuality mean nothing if they stop at the end of the page"