Tag Archives: J.L. Austin

Reflections and Plans: 3 week check-in

 

I’ve been working on my lists for three weeks now, and I thought it felt about time for a checkin and self evaluation. I’ve written seven reading response posts and tried a few different formats, with differing results. I have also dealt with a range of text styles which have challenged me, including multimodal webtexts, philosophical lectures, and an enormously wide-ranging subject reader. There have also been new developments, like getting my proposal accepted for CCCC, which are making me think about where my next moves will be on my lists after I get done with my current pile.

In this post, I want to evaluate my progress so far and lay out my strategy for the next month or so of work. I mean this to be helpful to my advisors–Mark McBeth, Joe Straus, and Jason Tougaw–as a way to get a sense of what I’m working on and what I’m thinking without our having to find time to meet too frequently. I know how time is for all of us.

First I reflect on the texts I’ve read and the challenges I ran into (probably most relevant to Joe). Then I talk about my ideas for my essay project on LD identity and dyslexia memoirs, which is relevant to my next reading steps for Joe and Jason’s lists. Finally, I talk about my disability service provider research project that just got picked up for CCCC, and how I can use Mark’s list to get me there. I welcome feedback of any kind, on any part, from any audience.

1) Reflections:

I have been relatively happy with my pace. Since starting my reading/writing schedule three weeks ago, I have gotten through one book (Austin’s How to Do Things With Words), nine new chapters of the Disability Studies Reader, and an eight-author webtext that was about equivalent to an entire journal article worth of articles, Multimodality in Motion: Disability and Kairotic Spaces. I also wrote a new draft of my complete orals lists, including a draft of the list rationale statement that must accompany the lists when I submit them to the department. You can see the lists, which are broken down into sub-topics, here.

All this, and I lost an entire week, nearly, conferencing with my students for their start-of-term writing consultation. (40ish in a week–draining but effective). Now that that’s over, I should be able to concentrate more on my reading.

I faced a few research challenges in this first push. First, I had to figure out how to reflect on something so large and abstract as Austin’s speech act theory in a single post. I ended up providing my own practical testing ground by imagining the pedagogical applications of Austin’s theories about performatives. This helped me extract what I really needed from Austin, I think.

My next problem was one of medium, figuring out how to consume, interpret, and reflect on a multi-part webtext about “access studies,” an emerging discourse in composition disability studies that employs some language and concerns from outside wheelhouse. While I’m interested in technology and access, it’s really not my primary interest in thinking about disability issues in higher education. So discussions about screen reader technology or image captioning were informative, but not alluring.  It is, however, an important strand of the new composition/disability discourse I’m exploring on Jason’s list. In the end, I did a scattershot approach here, summarizing all the pieces of the webtext rather than synthesizing them together. I led a talk on this webtext for our GC Comp Rhet area group meeting shortly after writing my post. I think I was able to do some of that synthesis there.

Finally I had my first anthology battle. I’d read about half of the Disability Studies Reader (4th edition) for Joe’s class last Spring, but I knew there were quite a few articles in it I wanted to get to. Many introduce key disability studies terms of discourses that I simply don’t know much about. And while they’re not central to my dissertation project, I would like to be able to teach disability studies classes someday, and this will require me to be somewhat conversant in issues like prenatal testing or the history of the ADA. So, I wanted to use the text to give me a general overview in the field before I dive in to specific discourses. However, I also didn’t want to get bogged down in the scope of the reader, which at over 500 pages could easily keep me still for the whole month if I let it. In the end I decided to try these things: (1) skip chapters that are by authors whose books I’m reading later (i.e. Davis’s chapters which are also in his books, Siebers’s, Garland-Thomson, McRuer); (2) write mostly about the ones with relevance to my dissertation work, but take good notes on all of them; (3) leave some to come back to later if I have time. I have three more chapters to go, and I’m looking forward to digging in to a single author for a while.

2) New (revised) DS seminar paper idea

I feel like the project I’ve been working on for my incomplete Disability Studies seminar paper has finally died for good. I went through many, many drafts of that thing and still couldn’t find my way to an argument. I feel I had so many disparite topics I wanted to weave together, I couldn’t actually find something definite to say. I think it’s time for me to set that project down and consider other options. Looking backward worn’t help me move forward on these lists.

One option I’m pursuing is using this blog to generate an essay, rather than planning the argument in advance based on texts I’ve already read. By directing my reading choices based on the themes and ideas that emerge from one text to another, I can gather multiple responses on a general topic, perhaps allowing an argument to emerge and develop over a number of posts. This will help me take some of the pressure off of needing to have every move of my essays planned from the get go. Also, because I’m following leads as I go, the writing will likely have an exploratory quality and energy to it I often lost when fiddling with the old drafts.

But that’s all about method, what about topic? I think the best thing I wrote for Joe’s class was my essay about LD identity and Tobin Sieber’s notion of disability as masquerade. I was able to take his model for disability performance and use it to establish an argument for learning disability as performance, and literacy as the controlling ideological force governing the performance. I also got to draw examples from my own experience, Mooney and Schultz’s dyslexia memoirs, and some pop culture representations of dyslexia I’m interested in, especially The Cosby Show. You can see the original essay here: Learning Disability as Masquerade

I think it would make sense for me to direct my immediate reading efforts on my disability studies list toward the goal of fleshing out and developing this paper. My next stop will be, I think, Siebers’ Disability Theory, which should give me a more contextualized version of the theory I was responding to in that draft. That will be my only theoretical apparatus for this project (I hope!), and the rest of my efforts will be spent on drawing examples from a small archive of the LD texts with which to test the fit of Seiber’s theories for LD. In addition to the memoirs and the Cosby episodes about Theo’s dyslexia, I’ve also discovered a fabulous after-school special about dyslexia starring Jaquin and River Phoenix called Backwards: The Riddle of Dyslexia (1984), which will match with the other texts very well I think. I will also, as before, draw from my own anecdotal experience to fill in whatever research gaps remain between me and a finished seminar paper. Once I get through these initial texts, I can ask Joe where else I could look on my lists to develop my thinking on the topic, and use his suggestions to guide my next steps in the reading and writing process. And so, in little steps forward, I might actually write a seminar paper.

3) Disability research in CUNY for CCCC talk

The second hopeful development is that I got a proposal accepted at this year’s Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) in Indianapolis. I missed the message for several days as it sat in my spam box, and I’d assumed I hadn’t gotten in. I was bummed: I had proposed to discuss the initial results from a series of interviews with disability service providers around CUNY and a preliminary analysis of CUNY institutional documents about disability, including DSO websites and public resources. Getting in was to be my motivation to actually conduct those interviews and start my analysis in a timely fashion, forcing me to have something to show by March. I used the CWPA talk in July for the same purpose, as a motivation to revise the research project I began in Mark’s class and sketch out the scope of the next step in my research.

Well, since I have gotten in after all, it looks like the research plan’s back on. I’d love to start by trying to get a meeting with Chris Rosa, the Assistant Dean of Student Affairs at CUNY central. I met him when I was putting on the English program graduate conference two years ago with Emily Stanback and Marrisa Brostoff. (Check out the conference website here.) Dr. Rosa has been a driving force in disability policy and discourse within CUNY since he himself graduated from the GC–not to mention his influence and contributions as executive officer of the Society of Disability Studies.

He would be in a unique position to help me access whatever documents or data or stories exist that would help me construct an institutional history of disability in CUNY. He would also be in a position to help me understand the logistic and legal terrain I’m getting into by asking questions about disability services at CUNY. Perhaps he could point me toward particular people at campuses who would have further leads, or be good interview subjects. This assumes, of course, he’s not too busy to see me and actually sees merit in my research. I’ll do as much research on these questions as I can alone first, of course.

I’m essentially planning to steer my reading work for Mark and Jason over the next one or two month push toward supporting these two projects. I’ve already talked through my plan for linking Joe’s list to the dyslexia masquerade essay. Jason’s list contains a number of the foundational dyslexia and LD works I’ll need to be able to draw upon to write that piece as well, and these should give me some ways to crack open that list on academic disability in a real way. I can do Dunn’s Learning Re-Abled, which gives an excellent overview of the various strands of LD scholarship (including neuroscience, literacy studies, and composition discourses around the topic); my work will be responding to Dunn’s pretty directly, I think, and my lists draw heavily from her own bibliography (with my spin, of course). She will remind me of the lay of the land and help me plan my next moves. Those next moves might take me to the LD memoirs, but I’m not committed to that yet. I may also want to spend some time with the early cognitive comp folks (Rose, Flower, Elbow).

For the moment, I’m working to finish up Cathy N. Davidson and David Theo Goldberg’s The Future of Thinking: Learning Institutions in a Digital Age (2010), the second monograph I’m tacking on Mark’s list. I bumped it to the top of the pile because Dr. Davidson is coming to the GC in two weeks to give a job talk, and I’ll get the chance to meet her. Obviously, I’m eager to get a good understanding of her work before she gets here. I should be done with Future of Thinking by Monday so I can go on to Now You See It, which I understand more directly addresses issues of ADHD and new literacy.

Once I get through Davidson’s work, I want to direct my reading on Mark’s list toward supporting my CCCC research project. Since my main concern in this draft of the project will be sketching out an institutional history of disability administration at CUNY, I will want to get some models for other institutional histories. I’ll look at George Otte and Rebecca Mlynarczyk’s Basic Writing (2010) as well as some texts I poached from Mark’s archive class about basic writing and Open Admissions history. If I can narrow down any texts that will model interview-based research methods, that would be nice too. Suggestions are very welcome. Perhaps the texts on institutional criticism methods will be a nice place to go next.

To anyone who made it this far: thanks for reading. I welcome your feedback or encouragement either in comments or in an email to me at a.j.lucchesi@gmail.com

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I say, therefore I do: J. L. Austin’s How to Do Things with Words

While I took great pleasure in reading Austin’s How to Do Things with Words, I am daunted by the task of summarizing and reflecting on it. Here I’ll try talking about what seems to me most important from Austin’s observations and what applications do I see for these theories for my work in composition.

I was initially drawn in by Austin’s distinction between the constative and performative uses of language. By offering a wealth of everyday examples (such as “I do” when said in a marriage ceremony or “I bet” when playing a card game) he convinced me quite quickly that there are many ways that we use words to do things. By examining how performative uses of language either fail or succeed to have their customary effect, Austin further distinguishes the ways performatives function within social and cultural contexts.

Neither of these points were revelations for me: Language is clearly an important tool we use to do things, like conduct business or set cultural laws. However, I found his taxonomy of infelicities–ways speech-acts can go wrong and fail in their effect–compelling, especially as he takes a joking tone when producing examples, occasionally absurd. I often felt dragged through his later taxonomizing, when he tries to evaluate grammatical heuristics for distinguishing performatives. The humor helps.

Austin finds no clear way to distinguish performative utterances from mere statements of fact.  Through his investigation, he establishes to three key senses in which to say something is to do something. In one sense, to say something is to perform a locutionary act–that is, to make noises (he’s not interested in gestural languages) that correspond to an accepted vocabulary and grammar. In another sense, to say something is sometimes also to perform an illocutionary act–that is, it’s a performative in the initial sense, like “I apologize” or “I object!”. Sometimes the sentences we make invoke a particular ritual force that performs a further action. Austin provides six major types of illocutionary acts, including utterances that pass judgment (“I judge you to be guilty of murder”) that commit oneself to further action (“I promise to bake you a cake”) or that enact a social  interaction (“I apologize for . . . ” or “I thank you for . . .”). Finally, he explains that sometimes when we say something we’re performing a perlocutionary act–that is, we affect an audience, often through complex, indirect means. The model here goes, “By saying X, I Y’d” as in “By saying ‘you’re so confrontational,’ I offended her.” Unlike the illocutionary act, which has its effects because it adheres to pre-determined (if sometimes hidden) social rules, in this case, my speech act is doing something out in the world that’s internal to my audience. I haven’t invoked a social ritual, but I have done something. To offend someone with my words is not to use any particular grammatical or syntactical structure, but it is one thing I can do when I perform an utterance. (Put I perform so much more than utterances!)

While I may not retain the particulars of Austin’s distinctions between, say, the types of infelicities to which performatives are vulnerable or the destinctions between the of illocutionary acts one might do (not so solid even for Austin), I am facinated his illusidation of the illocutionary and perlocutionary forces of speach-acts. I found myself reflecting on how this distinction applies to the kind of rhetoric I teach in my freshman composition course. It seems like an exceptionaly elastic way of considering how utterances function (whether in an argument or a story or a memo) : that is, without discussing rhetoric explicitly, Austin’s theory explains how rhetoric is possible.

I want to consider the pedagogical implications of each of these performative forces of utterances.

1. Locutionary– to teach students to be aware of the locutionary powers of their utterances is to focus on elements of grammar, mechanics, and vocabulary usage. We do this work frequently, and current-traditional pedagogies do this work above all others. Imperative here is training students to understand how to forge utterances that adhere to and exploit the capacities of (usually) standard academic English for making meaning. Prime concerns, then: spelling or capitalizing words conventionally (typographical version of Austin’s phonic act): or we might teach students how to choose the correct words and using them according to their proper meanings  for instance, the difference between affect and effect, and how to deploy them (Austin’s phantic act); we might also teach students about subject/verb agreement or about constructing sentences logically to make clear meaning (Austin’s rhetic act). Teaching students to level of sentence construction and correctness is to sensitize students to the locutionary forces of their speech-acts.

You’ll note that I’m trying to adapt Austin’s distinctions to suit the context of the writing classroom, where most utterances are written in prose For instance, I am rendering Austin’s phonetic act as equivalent to typographical distinctions like capitalization and unconventional spelling, which may have no phonetic effect at all, but seem roughly equivalent. I may be working in rough analogy here and thus overgeneralize. But for my purposes, I couldn’t help trying to extrapolate into what I know, which is writing instruction. At the end of this post, I’ll go further, and consider how these categories might work for other sorts of communicative acts we study and make in the classroom, including visual and digital performances. That will be pure speculation.

2. Illocutionary–what would it mean to teach students about the illocutionary force of language? This amounts, I think, to social constructivist pedagogy–showing students how to perform important rhetorical moves that make up our academic genres and teaching them how to avoid the particular infelicities to which those moves are vulnerable. The work I do with my students on discourse communities often wanders close to this model of literacy acquisition. Of the six styles of illocutionary act, some seem more applicable to thinking about teaching than others.

We often ask students to evaluate or assess another author’s point of view, essentially asking them to perform a verdictive. Verdictives pass a judgement. While other illocutionary acts might commit the speaker to some future action (“I swear to X”) or express the establishment of a social interaction (“I denounce you!”), verdictives speak from a position of authority and define something based on reason or evidence. Austin’s examples are an umpire calling “out” or a judge declaring that an accused person actually is guilty based on the evidence. Verdictives must come from those with clout and must corrispond to the accepted rules of evidence in order to work. Our job as instructors is to help students avoid the pitfalls of issuing verdictives, namely that the student doesn’t hasn’t established the authority to issue her assessment, that she’s basing her verdict on unacceptable reasoning or evidence, or that the assessment is vague. When we ask students to evaluate, estimate, assess, diagnose, describe, analyse, characterize (157) our role is often to help them see how their utterances may be sound or unsound, authoritative or amateurish.

The other most obvious category of illocutionary acts that correspond with what I teach fall into Austin’s category of expositives. An utterance is expositive when it involves “the expounding of views, the conducting of arguments, and the clarifying of usages and of references” (161) Here we see verbs like argue, describe, accept, agree with, begin by, conclude by, analyze, distinguish, illustrate, explain, etc. When I teach students to use these verbs consciously in their writing, I often think of it as teaching them to employ a distinctive argumentative voice, finding ways to make explicit the thinking process they intend their essay to perform with the reader. These kinds of performance are also subject to infelicities that we try to help our students avoid. So, when a student sets out to describe something and actually ends up summarizing instead, or when they set out to argue and do not actually present an argument. Or when they set out to disagree with an author’s perspective but don’t in fact offer a disagreement or merely deny or refute or reject the author’s position.

Since illocutionary forces rely on accepted convention, I think of approaches like Graff and Berkenstein’s They Say / I Say: The Moves that Matter in Academic Arguments method as essentially illocutionary pedagogy. Using templates, TS/IS shows students how to make the conventional moves that make up an argument in certain academic contexts. Within a social constructivists pedagogy, much of what it means to help students learn to write boils down to helping students understand the that rules govern a particular scholarly or professional discourse. Students learn how to employ conventional forms, how to perform “the moves that matter” without infelicities.

You will note that I’ve slid from talking about performances at the level of individual sentences or utterances to talking about them on a much larger scale–perhaps at the level of a paragraph or an entire essay. I’m uncomfortable with this elision, but I won’t go into it much here beyond giving a few quick examples of why I’ve done this. If students are going to use words to report the speech of someone else, for instance, academic conventions usually demand a more complicated ritual than can be performed in a single sentence. Strictly speaking, our students perform the act of quoting when they say, “I quote Austin, ‘these are all distinct from the producing of effects which is characeristic of the perlocutionary act’.” However, by itself, we as teachers would say that in order for the student to quote effectively (for it to be carried off “well”), he needs to perform other related utterances, like introducing and contextualizing the quotation to be presented, employing proper punctuation, analyzing or explaining the quotation’s relevance, altering the quotation with brackets to fit his own syntax, and so on. The act of performing a quotation in writing seems to be spread out over a great many individual sentences, as does the act of arguing or summarizing or describing. I wonder if in this sense a paragraph or an essay performs.

3. Perlocutionary–The truth is that I understand the perlocutionary much less well than I want to. Since it’s not the target Austin’s primarily aiming at, he doesn’t spend as much time elucidating it. An example:

In saying “I like other boys” I frightened my babysitter.

My language definitely did something: but what it did and why is a very difficult thing to figure out, and conceivably completely idiosynchratic to the babysitter. The exact same speech act could carry differing perlocutionary forces with different audiences (maybe the babysitter could have been delighted by the comment). If I understand the distinction he’s drawing, it seems like thinking about perlocustionary forces must lead down exceptionally complex theoretical terrain deeply wrapped up in the mess of affective experience, psychology, brain science. A connection to follow onward in the lists.

It seems a metaphor like “audience” is the pedagogical corrispondant to Austin’s perlocusionary performative. We train our students to anticipate the expectations of their readers, how their readers will likely react to what they’ve written. I often work with a model of peer review that focuses exclusively on familiarizing students with their audience and their audience’s responses to their work. My approaches largely derive from my experience with Sondra Perl and Mimi Schwart’s workshop model from Writing True, as well as my other research into cognitive comp folks like Peter Elbow. (He’s up soon on the list!). Most of the work in peer review is focused on the listeners explaining to the author exactly what their experience of the text was, exactly what it communicated and how. The idea is to help students make connections between their linguistic choices on the page and the effect it produced in an attentive audience. Over time, students use one another’s capacities to be listeners to hone their skills at effectively communicating ideas or feelings using their writing.

Well, not just their writing, of course. Or not in the traditional sense. In making these extrapolations, I’ve had to expand Austin’s scope pretty wide, and probably I’ve done a rough job of it. So, when I think of the possibilities if we include other sorts of textual performance in the mix, I feel certain I’ll stretch too far. However:

I don’t know a terribly large amount about visual rhetoric. I consider myself to be a visual thinker, and I’m certainly a voracious consumer of visual media, but I couldn’t tell you very much about what scholars have said about visual rhetoric. Dominique Zino has given me some idea, though, that it’s about analyzing and deploying non-verbal rhetorics, as visual artists or advertisers might do when composing an image for an audience. So, a Kara Walker image uses scale and size and medium and subject to communicate its message, to perform its desired effect. Since Walker’s an artist, it’s not trying to communicate facts, but a particular affective response–shame, intrigue, disgust, some admixture? Within the context of visual rhetoric, the communication relies almost wholely on that aspect of the perlocutionary performative that Austin attaches to non-verbal cues like gesture or expression. We teach students to read the visual cues in advertisements because we recognize the value of visual critical discernment in our present visual moment. Also, with the capacity for multimodal digital composing, students are able to experiment with performing utterances in formerly impossible of means. A cool example of something a student could conceivably make: http://pitchfork.com/features/cover-story/reader/janelle-monae/ (You know, but not so glossy and perfect and if I knew how to teach someone to make something like this.) I wonder: What would it mean to think of providing a hyperlink in a sentence as a quality of utterance? Another thread to track further, probably into the multimodal composing books on Mark’s list.

Other upcoming connections will probably come from the queer theorists and disability theorists on Mark’s and Joe’s lists. McRuer, Davis, Sedgwick, Halberstam (right?).

My next big reading, though, is Elbow’s Writing with Power: Techniques for Mastering the Writing Process. It’s one of my texts with Jason looking at process-era interests in cognition and the mind-brain. That strand will take me forward into contemporary cognitive composition work, and maybe link me there to multimodality. We’ll see what shakes loose as I read and write here.

My secondary reading at the moment is Lennard Davis’s Disability Studies Reader (4th edition). I’ve picked out all the chapters I think will be worth reading for my interests, which is still, like, 25 chapters. Thankfully, this includes many I read for Joe’s Disability Studies class last term, so I should be done within the weekend. I’m not yet sure how I can productively blog about that one. Obviously, brevity isn’t one of my strengths, and I really don’t think I need to summarize many of the ones that are quite distant from my dissertation work. For instance, I’m very glad I’m reading Ruth Hubbard’s historical essay on early 20th century hereditary science (read: eugenics). If I teach a DS course soon, I’ll likely assign it. But I doubt it will come up in my publishing life unless my scholarly interests take a severe turn in the coming years.

I guess I’ll use that, then. Out of the DS Reader, which articles will I want to write about going forward?

Finally, a rogue sentence I like but didn’t find a home for:

The total speech act, which exists within concurrent socio-cultural matrices: language (phonetic, phantic, rhetorical structures), custom (conventions of performatives, such as the rules of in/felicity for a given utterance), and affect (how an audience receives an utterance, makes meaning of it, and has a reaction).

Something a bit less . . . lyrical next time, I think.

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