Cinnabar and Alabaster

21. "historically, composition has been quite receptive to interdisciplinary borrowing, but it hasn't been equally receptive to borrowing from all directions"; he suggests that we pay way more attention to philosophy—"particularly the work of donald davidson"—than we've been doing rather than focusing all of our energy on trying to become a social science trying to become a hard science "when we grow up"
23. the problem: "the field as presently constituted oscillates between two such notions….on the one hand, there is a strong subjectivist current that celebrates the individual or autonomous self; on the other hand, this notion has been criticized as naïve, since selves are not monads as much as socially constructed. in contemporary jargon, the self is really a subject. i regard both models as reductive, but the real problem is that we seem caught in a dualism where these are the only available options. one reason why this is so is that this dualism is obviously reflective of the subject/object, inner/outer dichotomy so constitutive of the western philosophical tradition"; "after all, what is the announced purpose of american education? for each of us to realize ourselves and become true individuals"
25. paradox #1: "emerson told us not to imitate anyone else and to realize our own genius, but we can't follow his advice. to follow it would be precisely to be emersonian, to imitate ralph waldo emerson rather than realize ourselves"; "even if the writer breaks with the community around him, the act of writing (and publishing) indicates a belief in a reconstituted community of writer and reader"; "subjectivism is generally hostile to a focus on ('superficial') correctness" often couched as "'it is more appropriate to worry about that at some later stage.' this might seem reasonable in first grade, but in college, there isn't much later left, so what this really means is, 'we aren't going to deal with this'"; "yet any failure to master the linguistic code risks unintelligibility, and it also sense strong messages very different from those intended by the speaker"; the "central problem with any subjectist theory of composition…is the public and social nature of language"; "what we say may be inner, but the medium through which we must communicate what we want to say is outer and isn't something readily subject to our impulse to change it"; but "if expressivism finds its patron saints in concord, social constructionism finds itself in paris; michel foucault and more recently louis althusser….see a society in which we all do and say and think basically the same things" and
26. "similarity is because selves are not autonomous, not private, but are constructed by the society as a whole. teenagers want $175 shoes because they are affected by the ads they see, and since they do not choose the ads that are shown, in a sense they really aren't even choosing to buy the shoes. the notion of free choice made by an autonomous self is in this view seen to be naïve, since it ignores the networks of socialization in which our choices are made and by which they are conditioned." this raises questions: "are there real selves offstage somewhere making decisions and acting autonomously even if most of us are not? or is everyone equally socially constructed? if which case, who or…what constructs us? moreover, if we are socially constructed, what allows us to see that we are so constructed?"; "if either the powerful or the perceptive escape the landscape of social construction, then social constructivism is not a full description of our condition"; paradox 2: "how can a theory claiming systematic illusion also claim truth-value for itself without placing itself outside the illusion? and how can it justify that claim?" "foucault's perspective—the most radically antihuminist—tells us that there aren't any selves out there manipulating the machine, that the notion that we are selves is just a product of a certain historical moment, the ideology of modern society," but "being foucauldian is just as impossible as being emersonian, if for different reasons": "if we become foucauldian, we betray foucault's insistance that individuals do not count. there isn't supposed to be a foucault to be foucauldian about." gives us no agency, which by contrast althusser does.
27. paradox 2.5: "according to althusser, it is marxism—not an ideology but a science—that enables this escape from the conditions of ideology," itself a "blatantly ideological…claim"; "the wall between us and the others who are conditioned and unfree remains in place," & "this vision of the world as divided into the elect and the conditioned allows no way to value or to explain in anything other than negative terms what we share with the rest of society or inherit from cultural traditions. it also, to put it bluntly, allows no way to value our students unless they agree with us, unless [they] share our (critical) views on society." & so it's all broken: "not only does social constructionism collapse back into something not very different from emersonian celebrations of the minority of self-defining individuals, [but] social constructionist pedagogy becomes little more than a more sophisticated version of subjectivism, with a slightly stronger emphasis on what is wrong with those people over there who are not conditioned, and a slightly weaker emphasis on how we are not. this is preciesly what social constructivism has become in composition, a tool for the critical analysis of the social complacency of our students, which helps explain how, despite its language of radical critique, it could be accepted so quickly in composition. seeing this leads us to also see that the struggle between individual and social models of the self has been a gigantic exercise in shadow-boxing"
28. so, davidson: "has been centrally concerned with questioning the assumption that our views of the world can differ as radically from each other as the various traditions rapidly discussed here assume"; he argues that "speakers of a shared langauge and indeed speakers of intertranslatable languages can't differ so much as to live in different conceptual worlds or interpretive schemes," b/c "we learn language by being in the world which means that there are connections between events in the world and the langauge we use about those events and therefore between those events and the thoughts we have about them"—"since we share the world we are responding to and the language in which we respond, the thoughts we have about the world in that langauge are also sharable" & thus "the entire tradition of thinking of thought as private, inner, and mental as opposed to public, outer, and physical should be abandoned." & "the public(ity) of language and meaning has consequences for how we should think about thought as well": "thought…can be private in the sense of kept private but cannot be private in the sense of radically unknowable by others or radically different from anyone else's thinking"—it's free of the paradoxes b/c "the very intellectual and social context that gave birth to donald davidson also gave birth to people interested in the same problem as he and capable of understanding and responding to his work."
29. "networks of meaning, thus, are both inner and outer, including our selves and others in a web. it is not that we have something unique to say stemming from our personal experience before we negotiate the public structures of meaning, but what we have to say forms as a response to that public structure"; "to theorize what we share with others as taking away our individuality makes not sense, for our individuality only comes about as a reaction to those others"; "no one is as self-constituting as emerson would insist, but neither is anyone as constructed by social forces as foucault or althusser would insiste. we are socially constituted beings, but the society that constitutes us is in turn constituted by us."