In a technological world in which all news is almost instantaneously old news, I have a feeling that what went down at UC Davis on Friday, November 18th will stay fresh in our minds for some time. For posterity, the UC Davis chancellor, Dr. Katehi, ordered a group of tents in the UC Davis quad removed by the UC Davis police. The tents were erected in solidarity for another “Occupy Davis” encampment, part of the larger “Occupy” movement. When the police came, in full militaristic garb (because, apparently, college students represent a life-or-death threat) and encountered students peacefully sitting, arms locked together like non-violent protestors have done for literally decades, this is how the police choose to respond:
The video, like so many other images produced as the increasingly, and scandalously out-of-control and brutal militaristic police state apparatus confronts growing awareness and public expressions of anger over inexcusable structural inequality, speaks for itself. And as these images speak, the contradictions all around us, etched in the crumbling facade of what the well-off America tried to convince itself of, grow more and more visible. 
For example, here is a screen shot of UC Davis’s webpage, captured Saturdy morning after the pepper-spray incident.
Indeed, in 2011, nothing says “civility” quite like a face full of pepper spray.
I don’t mean to be glib. There were those–myself amongst them–who were ambivalent about the “Occupy” movement at first. We’ve all seen these “protests” arrive over the years with great gusto, only to falter due to faulty leadership (either too much or too little), or flimsy understandings of “how things really work.” Like spurned lovers, many of us have been tentative and wary.
But sitting in bed last night, watching the reaction play out on twitter, watching the videos, watching the whole drama unfold in real time (much like what happened in Oakland a few weeks earlier), it struck me that this is indeed something new, and something that will not be going away for some while. The movement may not have a leader, but it definitely has leaders. Far more importantly, however, is the nerve these “Occupy” protests seem to be touching on, and the completely unrestrained and–frankly–ugly response they have been getting. The protest and the protesters may not be what keeps this going, but rather the reaction they seem to get everywhere they go. It is in these over the top, completely uncalled for, and grossly disproportionate responses by police and the class interests they are being brought in to represent that I think we need to all recognize that this is not a test. For those of us like myself who always wondered what it might have been like to be alive during times like the hot summer of 1968, I think we’re about to find out.
For me, and I think for many of us, the question is now: where do we fit into this? At the least, I don’t think I would be able to hear of reports about a situation going down on my own campus without being called to immediately drop what I am doing and to go physically join them in solidarity. Sometimes it simply comes down to bodies on the ground (literally and figuratively) that matter.
But I am also an educator, a scholar, a researcher. I teach writing, I study the history of this endeavor, and I conduct research into the effects of literacy. Where does this fit in? What could writing and the teaching of writing say about all this?
Perhaps ashamedly, this one is a little tougher. For one, the discipline of “composition studies,” like many other disciplines, has proved to be remarkably adept at washing its hands of the dirt, grime, and blood that often accompanies the problems of life outside the bucolic campuses we like to imagine in our minds. While there have been a vociferous few who have always championed the act of getting into the fray, and doing so directly, on the whole the practice of writing instruction has remained as tepid as always. Part of the problem is the way in which we have always been quick to claim that problems such as these are the problems of some other discipline, some other area of expertise. As we cowardly say, we teach “writing,” and the economic and political problems of our times are for someone else to figure out. This is something I, like others, have been trying to dismantle. We are teachers of writing, yes, but we are also members of the academic community that is deeply and inextricably linked to what is going on at places like UC Davis.
But there is something deeper that is amiss, something that I want to try to pull out of all this that goes right down to the very root of what many of us do in academia. While academia certainly did not cause the current predicament we are in, we have put ourselves in a position in which any sort of response (properly, a leftist response in the very broad, non-partisan sense of the term) is doomed before it even begins. Let me try to explain.
For some time, the standard take on language and language usage has focused on something normally referred to as “discourse” or “discourses.” The term discourse refers to some web, structure, or totality of language features that shape and define meaning. It is an outward->in view of language in which users of language do not get to define the words they use, but rather receive meaning through words that have been previously defined by others over time. This supplanted a view or understanding of language in which meaning was derived by the individual mind and then language was used to externalize it.
Often, the idea of “discourse” is used to describe generalized conventions of a group or a community (e.g., discourse communities, etc). It is also used to describe a “way of talking about” things, as we have a “discourse of rights,” a “discourse of morals,” a “discourse of health.” Above all, though, discourse generally describes the way in which language “circulates.” There is no better explanation of this “circulation” than the Cohen Brother’s 1998 film The Big Lebowski:
Throughout the film, various utterances are heard, absorbed, and repeated by various characters in various situations. My favorite is the expression “this aggression will not stand,” first said by President George H.W. Bush and heard by the Dude as he is buying half and half in the very beginning of the film. This expression is then not only repeated by the Dude, but also by other characters (notably, Walter).
This is as good of an example as you can probably get in regards to the idea that we do not speak discourses, but “they speak us” (as is fashionable to claim). In other words, we find ourselves thrown into a world in which language, sayings, utterances, and so forth already exist and already have meaning. In this sense, “discourse” both enables and limits meaning. It enables meaning simply because without “shared” understandings and so forth, no one would know what we were talking about when we uttered something or other. For example, imagine going to a location where Starbucks was completely unheard of, and trying to order a “venti frappucino.” The looks you’d get would be ones of confusion. Similarly, meaning is also limited because this means, as mentioned before, we receive language and all the meanings, histories, and so forth that come with it. This is why, despite some people believing otherwise, certain words cannot be “claimed” or “cleansed” of historical meaning.
It is here that the question of determinism is one that is hotly debated. Some would argue that we are incredibly constrained by discourse while others might argue that due to multiple discourses always being present, that we have something like “agency.” However, this debate, as it typically commences, completely misses the more important question: what are we to make of the existence and nature of “discourse” in the first place?
The way “discourse” is generally treated is as an ontological feature of language itself. This is bizarre, as most contemporary socio-cultural theorists of language would also argue that “meta-narratives,” especially of the metaphysical types, are dead-end quests. Truths, as the story goes, are historically, socially, and even sometimes geographically situated. There can be no “eternal” notion of truth in which something is “true” for all time. Any attempt to understand something that does not show how it is “true” of a particular time and place, is simply asking to be proven wrong by a social or historical comparative analysis. And yet, many do just that when describing “how language works.” We might ask, perhaps in a somewhat fatuous manner, whether or not “discourses” will exist in 100 years.
This is not to say that language does not work in the way described above. To illustrate what I mean, here is Bill Black at a recent “teach in” at the Occupy LA demonstration. Bill Black was a financial industry regulator during the 1980s and the Savings and Loan scandal. His lecture consists mostly of that. However, at the 2:46 mark, Black says something worth paying attention to: “Not this journalist [referring to a previous speaker], but what we get as faux-journalism today repeats this [the idea of a "productive class" that creates job so long as it is unregulated] endlessly as if it is a fact, that they create jobs, that they destroy jobs.”
Here, yet again, is a perfect illustration of circulating “discourse” at work, particularly in the way that such circulation of “truths” function to shape the way people talk about things such as “the productive class.” If you want a slightly more comical–and perhaps tragic–illustration of this, check out this clip from Conan O’Brien’s late night show:
For those who study “discourse,” these examples demonstrate with chilling effectiveness why the study of “discourse” is important: it allows us to see the ways in which language is ultimately at the root of practically everything. It is through things like media in which everything we know, and this includes knowledge of our own “self,” is created and controlled. It is this descriptive and analytic perspective of language that has come to dominate the academy. I say descriptive and analytic because this view positions the hyper-localized study of language itself as the proper method to understanding everything. Or, in other words, the goal is the study of discourse itself.
That’s all well and good. I have no problems with this. As the two examples above show, the way academics have found to describe language is fairly accurate. But as I mentioned above, the more interesting question is what, exactly, we are studying when we study “discourse.” If it is just language and the way “language works,” then that’s the end of the story. However, if we take the socio-cultural theorist’s position seriously–perhaps more seriously than they themselves take it–then we have to realize that the descriptions we create of “how language works” are themselves simply descriptions of a historical time and place. In short, discourse is nothing more than the linguistic feature of a particular social arrangement, in all its historical splendor.
Going back to the Conan piece, the repeating of scripted language for the news story occurs because major media companies (the AP, for example) create stories and multiple outlets simply repeat the words given to them. That is not a feature of language, but a feature of language within a very particular social structure. Is this an illustration of discourse, or the effects of the consolidation of news media in the United States? The interesting thing about how language “circulates” in such a manner, and in particular the way in which individuals use, re-use, and often times simply repeat “talking points” they have heard is why they might do this in the first place. After all, instead of simply “repeating” bits and pieces of language, there could be an intermediary step in which such utterances are critically examined. The old saying around Washington is that if you repeat a lie long enough, it eventually becomes true. But why? Is this a feature of language, or a feature of how humans interact with language?
So what we see is not language, but something about the world we are living in. The hyper-focus on language itself has simply obscured this understanding. While it may be true that “nothing exists outside of discourse,” the way “discourse works” doesn’t exist outside of history, either.
(long aside: why don’t theorists take their own positions seriously and run them out to the end of the line? Who knows. One cannot discount sheer laziness, though. Instead of taking the time to read major theorists and philosophers who deeply informed thinkers such as Foucault, Derrida, and so forth, many scholars these days are content to work from a synthesized “hand out” about Marx or Hegel or whatever that they got during their doctoral coursework, instead of going to the actual source itself. It is in these compressed “too long; didn’t read” versions that such nuanced understandings fade with each copy that is xeroxed. Anyway…)
On the surface, this may seem as a sort of “small ball” conversation within circles of philosophers and theorists. Much of what I am saying about discourse simply being an effect of social structures would not really cause too much controversy. But these discussions, particularly when they hit the classroom, start to take on immense importance. They take on immense importance because it is here, in this critical space, that the “too long; didn’t read” versions come to take over for the “really long, super complicated” understandings of language. For example, the study of “discourse” does not really say much about what to do with such knowledge of discourses. Going back to the Conan clip, what is a teacher to say to students who have just watched it? They could just simply describe it the way I have, to note how language is repeated, passed around, circulated, becomes discourse. And for many, this is exactly where the lesson ends. This, coincidentally, is where far too many lessons have ended.
What’s missing here, though, is the rest of the story. The part about “how language works” is itself historically situated and a product of very specific social structures. This part, though, is the most crucial part, because it indicates that it need not be this way. We can, and this has been the most crucial aspect of Marx’s work as well as Dewey’s work in the United States, create different ways that language circulates. We can, for example, teach students to never simply accept “truths” from any source without first skeptically treating it against evidence and experience within a community of like minded inquirers. We can, if we wanted to, make this a major goal of our educational enterprise.
This, though, is not what we have done. And without this extension, we are relegated to standing by helplessly while discourses do, in fact, “hypodermically inject” individuals, who are themselves helpless against simply repeating such language to others.
This, then, is the other “lost generation.” Much ado has been made about how the current college-aged group will enter in to a “lost generation” due to the terrible economy, much like Japan and other countries have experienced their own “lost generation.” But while this generation may face a lessened potential in regards to income earning, the truly lost are the ones who cannot help but be held prisoner by the ideas of others, damned to a life in which the best they can do is simply repeat what they hear on the news, at their church, and from their fathers. These are not just the uneducated, but a massive swath of American society. For example, journalists themselves these days apparently understand their work as simply repeating what each side in a controversy has to say. What they’re not doing is understanding their work as actually examining the claims of different sides. They could, in fact, often times “go find out” if one side is simply offering empty claims. They could, in fact, engage in inquiry themselves about the stories they report on instead of just repeating what the newswire tells them to. They, like others, are “lost.”
I say this is the lost generation, and it probably goes back a few decades, simply because they are now in the unenviable position of watching all these “Occupy” protests gain steam and having virtually no capacity whatsoever to understand what is going on. I watch students just a few years older than those in the UC Davis photograph and they are so completely stricken by the “old discourses” that they have no ability to detach themselves from that they cannot fathom why students would engage in such actions.
Here, then, is a chance for many. While we all have different parts to play in this unfolding narrative, what I am suggesting here is that one part that needs to play out in the academy, and in particular, the humanities is a thorough re-thinking of all the things we have come to cherish. First on the list, in my mind at least, is to go back to our views of language and to really question whether we “got it right” or not. As I’m suggesting here, it’s time to start realizing that we may have simply been wrong and now is high time to rethink about how we describe the nature and function of language, especially in how it changes the way we teach in schools.
