100th Post and Bruce Horner

Bruce Horner's Terms of Work for Composition: A Materialist Critique takes up a "cultural materialist critique of work" in composition studies, because the issue of work -- variously defined -- plays such a crucial role in composition. Horner thus advocates for a "material social critique" (of writing) that acknowledges, theorizes, and resists context/ labor conditions. Essentially, Horner wants the field to recognize the "materiality" of all the work we do, especially student work, which, in his courses, comprises the main text.

Key quotes:
"Rather than denigrating or praising what passes for intellectual work for its intellectuality, we need to insist on the material social conditions making that work possible and shaping it; we cannot use its 'intellectuality' as a basis for denying its materiality" (9). Crucial point in book; sums it up, I think.

On pp 14-18, Horner characterizes the theory/practice debate under the head "Work in Composition". He divides the field in two categories: those concerned with "professionalization", and those concerned with teaching. One reason for such polarity stems from the marginal status of composition in relation to English studies and in the academy as a whole. Thus, those interested in "professionalizing" adopt theory; they publish in journals, conduct research studies, and essentially "threaten to distance Composition from its material ties to and identification with teaching" (15).

But the practitioners aren't much better. According to Horner, "these faculty define their own knowledge in terms of their experience of what 'works' in the classroom, and pride themselves on their dedication to teaching and their students. In so doing, however, they increase the marginality of their position in the academy and subject themselves to ever more degrading working conditions"(15).
The solution is invariably to adopt a material social critique; however, Horner is cautious to advocate not for a "balance...but intervention at the point of their interrelations" (27). That is, he urges the field to ignore the distinction between theory and practice:

"...in order to address the material conditions of our labor, we must abandon such distinctions, in effect making it our work to articulate the interpenetration of all these as constitutive of our work. This will require initially foregrounding the ways in which contradictions embedded in distinctions between intellectual and non-intellectual labor and the commodification of intellectual labor play out at the site of composition" (29).

"The cultural materialist alternative for which I would argue would insist, instead, not only on the political, strategic nature of specific representations but on the necessity of their being so -- that is, it would insist on both recognizing the inevitably contingent character of representations and understanding one's choice of representation in terms of the specific material contingencies of one's teaching" (35).

"...I would argue for representing students as above all else as workers, working on themselves, Composition, the academy, and the social generally" (35).

"The alternative challenge Composition faces is how teachers and students can confront the ways in which each material act of writing and reading mediates, in the sense of actively re-forming and transforming, and is mediated by social identification, difference, and power, both responding to and reconstructing or revising these" (37).

"Here let me emphasize that it is within such oppositions that the term 'student work,' like the term 'women's work,' appears as an oxymoron, by definition less or other than real work -- than, say, the work of men. And of course, these conceptions are part of a chain, or nest, of binaries derogating teaching, the academic, the feminine, the personal, and so on which distinguish labor from work, feeling from thought, experience from intellect, the personal from the social, composition from academic disciplines, and the academic from the real" (53).

"...compris[ing] all the activities of its provocation, composition, distribution, and reception and the involvement of these with the other: work, in short, as material social practice, where agency meets structure" (66) --- possibly the definition of m-s-p?

"What I am suggesting, however, is that in addition to these curricula, we need to acknowledge as well a curriculum 'hidden' from or ignored or dismissed by the dominant, one that promotes alternative or oppositional interests" (117).

"The composition course identifies academic work as a material social practice. Even in its most debased, skills and drills forms, it takes as its primary focus the materiality of the writing that constitutes the bulk of academic work. In focusing on the materiality of academic 'discourse,' of whatever stripe, it threatens continually to reveal the location of academic disciplinary work in the material realm. That is to say, Composition reveals what most disciplines deny: the contradiction between the apparent stability of their disciplinary subject as an abstract, reified entity, and the necessity for its continual, material reproduction through pedagogy generally and writing in particular" (146).

"The discourse of academic professionalism limits how we think of the work of Composition, defining legitimate work as the acquisition, production, and distribution of print-codified knowledge about writing: the production and reception of scholarly texts. In this discourse, the 'work' associated with such activities as teaching is deemed 'labor,' the implementation of the work of professional knowledge, and thus susceptible to proletarianization" (173). ----> theory/practice

"But as the Amherst tradition and the work of Coles and Bartholomae illustrate, the material practice of tradition -- including writing and writing style -- is not to be so easily divorced from theory or any of its 'components'"( 200).

"This commodified view of scholarship provides a different perspective from which to understand the theory/practice debate. The work of theory, or, better, 'theorizing,' is not typically imagined as material practice but as commodity whose properties reside in the 'theory' itself, understood as existing outside the material realm" (226).

I have quite a bit to say about this book; mostly that I disagree with a lot of the readings of schools/ theories that Horner evinces as evidence (i.e. expressivist pedagogy, the Amherst school, etc). In addition, I believe that the project-- while useful and productive for us and our students -- still imposes a particular set of values on the students that I find problematic. Horner would have it that by taking the students seriously, by considering them workers, we value them and can overcome the marginalization that they and us have encountered. But I can speak from experience that this would not, and does not, work with all students... and not because they're apathetic, either. Finally, I think that this does not effectively theorize the theory/practice debate outside the position of, "well, we need both." In other words, Horner's approach, in accounting for the material social residue of theories and practices, suggests that we can transcend these binaries in favor of something more productive and resistant. But can it? I guess I was expecting much more from this book, since it's been touted to me as "canonical". And what's up with the fact that Horner denigrates the very curriculum he installed at UWM? Anyone?