The Human Conversation

The notion of con­ver­sa­tion stuck with me as I fin­ished Kenneth Bruffee’s essay. From time to time, I find myself lost in the­ory, praxis, ped­a­gogy, rhetoric, and dia­logue. I am con­fronted by an over­whelm­ing sense that the work we do as schol­ars is mean­ing­less. What good does it do to argue about lit­er­a­ture and com­po­si­tion in an impar­tial, ster­ile uni­verse where nei­ther the inclu­sion of mar­ginal authors into the canon nor the philoso­phies of famous French thinkers mean any­thing? Perhaps this is a fleet­ing nihilist streak in me, but it runs deep.

When I get into such a mood, I must stop. I take a men­tal step back­ward and tell myself that all the things schol­ars do (lit­er­ary or oth­er­wise) is part of a game. We play the game, and if we do well, we are rewarded with tenure or per­sonal sat­is­fac­tion. Questioning the game makes no sense since that road leads to despair and mad­ness. We play the game, for no bet­ter rea­son than every­body else is play­ing it. After all, objec­tively, what does it accom­plish to exam­ine the scrib­blings of peo­ple who have been dead two hun­dred years of more?

So if I want to con­tinue work­ing, I have to stop prac­ti­cal thought and return to the text with some mea­sure of faith and a pinch of sus­pended dis­be­lief. The work I do, I tell myself, may not be good for the uni­verse, but it is good for me now.

Given all of this, it is nat­ural that I con­nected with the quo­ta­tion Bruffee takes from Michael Oakeshott, who writes that we are the inher­i­tors of a con­ver­sa­tion “begun in the primeval forests and extended and made more artic­u­late in the course of cen­turies ... which, in the end, gives place and char­ac­ter to every human activ­ity and utter­ance” (Oakeshott, quoted in Bruffee 419). This con­ver­sa­tion is the game I referred to ear­lier. It is the ongo­ing activ­ity that I, from time to time, have to con­sciously choose to take part in. And while I am enthused to find that some­one else thinks as I do about the “game,” I am not so enthused about the impli­ca­tions of this line of thinking.

Since human­ity takes part in an eter­nal con­ver­sa­tion, some have con­nected the con­ver­sa­tion to thought itself. Geertz writes that “human thought is con­sum­mately social” (Bruffee 420), a thought Bruffee fur­thers when he says thought is “an arti­fact cre­ated by social inter­ac­tion” (420). Social inter­ac­tion in the con­ver­sa­tion val­i­dates human thought. “To think well as indi­vid­u­als,” Bruffee writes, “we must learn to think well collectively—that is, we must learn to con­verse well” (421). Thought serves the con­ver­sa­tion, empow­er­ing it. No mat­ter what I do, my thoughts are part of the con­ver­sa­tion; all I think or say is social.

I am uncom­fort­able with this because I also believe in human agency, that ideas have the power to alter per­cep­tion and, hence, reality—now, I do not equate thought and writ­ing. I think they are two dif­fer­ent crea­tures; related but not iden­ti­cal, the two are per­haps close enough to lump them into a con­ver­sa­tion about the con­ver­sa­tion. James Berlin thinks sim­i­larly: “since lan­guage is a social phe­nom­e­non that is a prod­uct of a par­tic­u­lar his­tor­i­cal moment, our notions of the observ­ing self, the com­mu­ni­ties in which the self func­tions, and the very struc­tures of the mate­r­ial world are social con­struc­tions” (“Rhetoric” 731). In a way, I agree with Berlin when he writes that “to teach writ­ing is to argue for a ver­sion of real­ity, and the best way of know­ing and com­mu­ni­cat­ing it” (“Contemporary Composition” 256). Writing teaches stu­dents to shape their own ver­sions of real­ity by describ­ing what they per­ceive. Granted, writ­ing is tech­ni­cally use­less with­out an audi­ence (“dis­course com­mu­nity”), and I do not claim that stu­dents should fol­low the “expres­sion­ist” path Berlin describes. Yet I think there needs to be a bal­ance between human agency and com­plic­ity in the conversation.

That’s where John Trimbur comes in. Trimbur believes the cov­er­sa­tion, as out­lined by Rorty this time, ignores its con­flict with iden­tity. The con­ver­sa­tion per­sists because of “our loy­alty” to it. There is no end to the con­ver­sa­tion, only “con­tin­u­ance” (Trimbur 466). Conflicts are homog­e­nized; they become “abnor­mal dis­courses” that resta­bi­lize the con­ver­sa­tion (468). Trimbur believes we can­not ignore the con­flict because it is “a stan­dard fea­ture of con­tem­po­rary social exis­tence” (469). In response, he wants to pre­serve the con­ver­sa­tion and the con­sen­sus that feeds it by mak­ing con­sen­sus a Platonic ideal, safely perched on a “hori­zon which may never be reached” (Trimbur 476).

Trimbur instead wants us to read the gaps and irreg­u­lar­i­ties, the “dis­sensus.” Only in this way can we deal with the con­ver­sa­tion in a way that pre­serves our iden­ti­ties. Rather than iden­ti­fy­ing one thread of the con­ver­sa­tion as priv­i­leged, schol­ars can take an almost hyper­tex­tual, non-hierarchical view.

So over­all, I find myself uncom­fort­ably wedged between want­ing to accept the con­ver­sa­tion and want­ing to assert my iden­tity, and I think this has to do with the cul­tural moment in which I find myself. But more on that at a later time. Suffice to say, I think that a perch some­where in the mid­dle of Trimbur’s conflict-theory and the idea of the all-encompassing con­ver­sa­tion is where I belong. It is only a mat­ter of rec­on­cil­ing the the­o­ries and find­ing just what that perch means.

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