Ignorance as Critical Practice

Below is the transcript of a discussion I had two years ago with my friend Rob about the Sisyphean task of teaching university freshmen how to engage in academic discourse. He and I are both of the conviction that the rhetoric of such writing can only be approached once one has acquired appropriate habits of mind, such as a healthy skepticism toward received knowledge and the critical awareness that this skepticism engenders. While among many, critical thinking and writing are highly valuable skills, the sad fact is that it for a vast many more, these skills are simply recherché, like the talents of the blacksmith or wheelwright, which find a market only in the incredibly small domain of touristy pioneer village mock-ups. Perceived as the relic of an era in which people had little else at their disposal to beguile their leisure, critical writing becomes as obsolete as the dusty Commodore VIC-20 in your parents attic. Thus confronted with having to deal with the rigors and demands of a mode of writing that to them has no perceivable connection to the cash nexus, the typical freshman reacts with impatience and hostility, itching to move on to the more practical concern of enhancing his future earning power, which, though he may not have the foggiest idea how this is acquired, to his mind certainly does not involve English 101.

Now an editor of a major magazine and himself a blogger of the first order (read his blog at http://marginal-utility.blogspot.com), Rob had been for several years a freshman composition instructor like me. We both speak from several years of experience, and though I regret the cynical tone of our exchange, I maintain that, given the ever-worsening state of affairs in higher learning, cynicism is inevitable.

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Rob: How's your academic life going? Still wading through internecine bullshit?

UJ: I am exhausted, but mostly from teaching freshman composition. My students are impervious to anything remotely intellectual. In fact, they are extremely suspicious of anything that even smacks of intellectualism.

Rob: Just like Americans. I keep explaining in cover letters why I had to stop teaching, and I end up saying things like that. That probably doesn't raise my hireability threshold.

UJ: And they are overly willing to submit to my authority when choosing topics, not because they respect me, but because they're trying to get me to micromanage their essays at every stage.

Rob: —Very tempting, because it provides the illusion of accomplishment when you fashion the product for them. You can pretend the product and not the producer is important, but then you are in the same position as the factory manager. I used to want to write all 25 essays for my students, which seemed to me a more efficient process. I lost sight completely the whole goal of teaching: thinking rather than achieving a tangible end.

UJ: Yeah, my sharper dialectics put me in an enviable position, because I could exploit them at every turn, but I'm ethically obliged to restrain myself from the very thing that would conduce to my financial success in the corporate world: i.e., exploiting the effort of others.

Rob: Ethics, haven't you abandoned them by now? Hasn't the recent election [of Nov. 2002] convinced you there is no good fight left to fight?

UJ: Yeah, but my reasoning is that my ethical conduct prevents ethics from disappearing altogether. I've become rather antinomian as I've aged.

Rob: With social politics generally irrelevant, I guess a personal politics is worth preserving. I wish there were a way to escape the culture's tendency to make us squander our energies mounting small-scale ethical battles with ourselves. Faith is all there is, I guess, to see a meaning in the personal war; we can't ever have enough perspective to see what it might mean—the same with classroom efforts.

UJ: What profit a man if he gain the whole world, and lose his soul in the bargain? Or something like that.

Robert: Who said that? Dick Cheney?

UJ: Ken Lay. . . . I have found that the recommended rhetoric for essay end comments to students has either stifled me utterly, or has forced me into totally ridiculous phraseology: e.g., rampant use of passive voice, anthropomorphizing the essay, etc.

Rob: It's a surreally euphemistic form of writing.

UJ: My grading practice and mind have been colonized by simpering relativist nabobs!

Rob: Maybe you should do the "grading conference" where you can rub their nose in the essay: "What did you do here? Come on, come on, tell me! What were you thinking! Why did you write that! What made you choose that word, hmm?" Then you can make apparent the social conditioning, encoding, and brainwashing inherent in the writing process. . . .

UJ:—Which are reinforced by my comments.

Rob: . . .Your true role as monological disciplinarian comes to the fore. You could say, "If you don't speak the hegemony, and thus think the hegemony, how can you enjoy your hollow life within it?"

UJ: The feigned disinterest of the rhetoric of marginalia is totally bizarre; it disconnects any sort of agency between the student who writes and the document s/he writes. The document just becomes this miraculated text, finding its way into the world without any sense of it[s] being created. I think that this is a subtle form of the convictions underwriting many of the tenets of pomo victim politics. The paper just is.

Rob: Holding the student accountable for it seems like some kind of rape on the student's dignity. When in fact the mollycoddling presumes the dignity of an independent sentient being who already doesn't exist. Best to teach them how to write cover letters, the only document that they will feel truly invested in.

UJ: Exactly. And they are so ready to read personal affronts into these comments, which I've labored to make as oblique and insipid as possible.

Rob: I tried to circumvent that by being as impersonal in the classroom as possible, to be remote, and as though I didn't know any of them. But in our narcissistic society no one feels empowered to produce anything difficult unless they feel that it is personally demanded. Everything has to be personal or else they don't care.

UJ: Why is evaluating quality of thought forbidden? Am I always already some sort of fraud?

Rob: They are used to everything seeming like ads, as though directed solely at them, and their life become the baseline for what is meaningful. They are used to everything in their lives apparently pandering to them. . . .

UJ: —Ah!

Rob: . . . All discourse seems to single them out as special, but our classroom discourse doesn't, so they tune it out, behave as though it can't be significant—it belongs to the denatured discourse that their essay belongs to, produced by and for no one.

UJ: They are defiantly and professedly complacent, and thus make themselves spectators of their own lives. But they are duped into thinking that this passivity has allowed them to penetrate what they see as the obfuscative tendency of academic discourse, and thus made them hipper, savvier.

Rob: That is so true; ignorance passes as a kind of criticism, a critical practice. . . .