Cinnabar and Alabaster

passages
505. "one theme recurring in recent work in composition studies is the institutional distinction maintained between Authors and student writers"; "the binary rests on a bankrupt concept of the Author's 'self' as the unitary autonomous origin of writing"; "what appears to be needed are strategies which acknowledge the institutional operation of the Author/student binary while combating its effects"; "most of these….dominant pedagogical strategies compositionists have devised in response to the dilemmas posed by the Author/student writer binary….situate student (and other) writing in relation to the social in ways that do not confront but elide the…binary."
506. 1st warning: "the dominant attempts to silence alternate elements of the social by 'seizing' the definition of what constitutes the social. by inflating the sense of its reach, the dominant descourages resistance: what remains, it claims, is not social but marginal and therefore of no consequence."
507. 2nd warning: "the terms we use to name the location of the non-dominant are those granted by the dominant and so also in its service: currently, such terms as 'individual,' 'personal,' 'private,' 'natural,' 'experiential,' 'emotional,' 'feminine,' 'irrational,' 'psychological.' even the terms 'individual' and 'social' may invoke for many the dominant's conceptualization of these as discrete, uniform, opposed, and inherently ranked, rather than dialectically interrelated and fluid. efforts to recuperate the oppositional potential of areas of human practice identified as 'personal' or 'private' or 'emotional' by the dominant must involve the reconceptualization of these as 'unquestionably social' rather than somehow autonomous and separate from the social."
in williams, the Author operates @ 3 social levels: (1) "Authors operate within a 'political economy of writing'" involving markets & distribution; (2) they "employ socially inherited forms—a language and written conventions and notations"; (3) the only level at which the author isn't defined as "an autonomous individual" operating within a social sphere: "the continuing process by which 'the contents of [the author's] consciousness are socially produced"
508. "a variety of barriers stand in the way of reaching this final level of accepting the social production of individual consciousness": (1) "the monolithic understanding of the social"; (2) it's hard to understand "the 'emergent' arising out of 'practical consciousness' that is part of the process of the social production of consciousness"; (3) "there is resistance to recognizing the social production of consciousness because it undermines the concept of the Author as a quintessentially autonomous (masculine) individual on which english literary study—and academic institutions and capitalist ideology generally—depends"; "this concept of the autonomous Author is linked to the removal of writing from the social material world, redefining it from a socially located activity to an aestheticized, idealized art object"
509. "one motive for this redefinition, clearly, has been 'a simple class emphasis, to separate "higher" things—the objects of interest to free men, the "liberal arts"—from the "ordinary" business…of the "everyday world"'" (williams). what happens is that "by eliding the social production of consciousness, such pedagogies ironically neglect the capacity of students to engage as social agents in not only the reproduction but the transformation of social relations."
510-1. three common pedagogical "approaches"…"containing (social) contradictions": (1) "equating individual sutdent writers' desires with the demands of [the 'real'] world" (i.e. saying that their recognition of how knowing x will benefit them in today's context = they want to learn x); (2) "a…more common set of pedagogies allows for the possibility of difference between official forms and practical consciousness yet sidesteps any confrontation between these. the sidestep" is done by either: "meaning is posited as existing outside a society's language practices" & "the introduction of the effect of social pressures on the writer is delayed" until later points of the curriculum—"the distinction between 'process' and 'product,' used to resolve the contradiction between granting authority while rejecting its material enactment in 'drafts,' appears in course designs that delay attention to matters of formal conventions of writing only to introduce these later as givens to which students must conform" "these courses can seem at best irresponsible, at worst hypocritical"
512-3. "a third way of responding to the Author/student writer binary…[is] a return to expressivism" (w/all the individual authorizing-focus that entails); "paradoxically, if pursued, such strategies can lead to the same 'hypocrisy or despair' as the others, since a failure to acknowledge the social pressures on writers precludes any resistance to them"
514. "if there is a danger is removing the classroom from the social, there are comparable risks in more recent strategies which identify the social with the classroom": "collaborative pedagogies mirror expressivist attempts to create a zone free of power relations within the classroom, but bolster such attempts with a sense of the inherently social construction of knowledge. they aim to counter the academy's traditional relations of hierarchical authority by creating more democratic relations in the classroom…but differ from e xvsfrq431 xvsfrq431xpressivist pedagogies in their resolute insistence on the sociality of writing….writing is likened to conversation, requiring by definition more than one party." "indeed, the 'marriage' of democratic aspirations and 'practicality' seals over a contradiction between imagining the social as a process of struggle and seeing it as a static realm of conflict-free harmony. …the problem is one of transferring the attributes of autonomy and uniformity from the individual 'Author' to the individual community, and specifically the community of the writing classroom."
515. "so while this pedagogy acknowledges…the 'sociality' of authorship, it is a conception of sociality from which heterogeneity, conflict, and struggle have been excised."
516-7. "multicultural" or "contact zone" pedagogies "aim to overcome the silencing of difference effected through the maintenance of 'normal' discourse"…."where these…pedagogies can run into trouble, however, is in failing to recognize the operation of such pressures within individual student consciousness as well as within the classrooms, and in failing to recognize the contact zone itself (or multicultural education) as an historically specific strategic response, a representation of education put forth in competition with dominant representations of education as the site for (re)producing social homogeneity."
518-19. "(1) we need to recognize such [limited as it necessarily is] articulation as socially produced and mediated rather than as 'free' expression, and (2) mere articulation—the achievement of 'contact'—is not sufficient. otherwise 'contact,' like 'difference,' becomes reified as a process in and for itself rather than being understood as a response to, and with consequences in, specific social and historical conditions"; "what threatens attempts to teach writing as the site for mediation of cultural conflict is the residual power of this first view, in which writing is reified into an object. this danger appears currently in two sorts of arguments: that students can gain authority in their writing through learning a set of rhetorical positionings, and that students can resist oppression through experimentation with diverse or alternative discursive forms. both sorts of arguments aim to address the disparity between Authors and student writers and the resulting disparagement of students, the first by teaching students to produce texts that enact conventions for establishing rhetorical authority, the second by having students produce texts that break from those conventions of writing that may restrict their thinking. what links the two, however, is their identification of Authorship with (objectified) texts which students are then expected to produce"; "pedagogies aiming to teach students to achieve 'authority' through adopting strategies found in already authorized texts sidestep the social relations inherent in the authorizing of those texts while attempting to assimilate students to conventional textual representations of authority"
520. "efforts to teach students to establish rhetorical authority risk bracketing the work of the classroom from the social and reinscribing the status quo of the 'author,' naming as the soial a uniform official view of the classroom, unless they are accompanied by students' critique of the conditions of the various practices by which types of 'authorship' are socially produced, as well as those producing its opposite, the 'student writer.'"
522. "dominant notions of what constitutes work and the social can easily blind us (and others) to the kind of cultural work—for better and worse—accomplished in the writing and reading in which we and our students engage. but learning to recognize and intervene actively in that work can be a way to resist the dominant pressures on our practices as readers and writers, pressures symbolized for many in composition precisely by the Author/student writer binary. teachers persuaded to combat the deleterious effects of the Author/student binary by confronting rather than eliding its operation in their work face the question of how to recover the sense of work and the social in writing as always in process while recognizing (and combating) the dominant's efforts in that process to define both in fixed, limited forms."
526. "we can resist the damaging effects of the Author/student binary on the field, not by promoting students' accession to an authorial status we know to be problematic, nor by consigning them and ourselves to the 'low' labor assigned by the dominant to composition, but by joining with our students to investigate writing as social and material practice, confronting and revising those practices that have served to reify the activity of writing into texts and authorship."