To get a deeper, historical understanding of the misconstruance of Berthoff’s work that seems to gather along the lines of a dialectic/dialogue split, I turn now to Patricia Bizzell, whose work McComiskey enrolls above in a way that’s inhospitable to Berthoff’s legacy. Bizzell considered Berthoff a mentor, but she never seems to have apprehended or valued the notion of meaning-as-mediator in Berthoff’s praxis, or Freire’s. This misapprehension, we will see, seems to contribute to Bizzell’s loss of faith in Freire’s pedagogy. We sensed, in McComiskey’s writing, Bizzell losing faith in Berthoff, believing she “downplayed the projects of largescale political change that always accompany Freire’s practice” (McComiskey 59). This loss of faith seems also to have accompanied Bizzell’s rise into “the social view” at the expense of
allatonceness. The situation sheds light on the place of Bizzell’s powerful concept “discourse communities” in relationship to Berthovian triadicity; “discourse communities” is nearly a commonplace term in our “disciplinary” lexicon (Adler-Kassner and Wardle). But the allatonceness of triadicity, the last section of this chapter will show, could be powerfully
foundational to the disparate theories and concepts, like “discourse communities,” that currently shape the subfields of comp/rhet.
Bizzell never seems to have developed an imagination for the pedagogical implications of “the third,” as Berthoff calls it. Examining Bizzell’s thought process as she wrestled with
Berthoff’s ideas can help us understand, I think, ways in which many scholars, inspired by terms of the 80s and 90s, continue to think in “killer dichotomies,” and so misconstrue Berthoff’s ideas. What gets lost is an apprehension of what I call “the learning imagination.” This concept, “the learning imagination,” has the potential to unify the field’s discussions, I think, but it still waits to be realized by the field.
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In my experience, one of the best resources available for apprehending Bizzell’s thinking about triadicity exists in a letter written to Berthoff from then “junior scholar” Bizzell in 1986. Included in the Ann E. Berthoff papers archived at UMass Boston’s Joseph Healey Library, the letter seems to be a response to an informal review by Berthoff of Bizzell’s essay
“Foundationalism and Anti-foundationalism in Composition Studies,” published in PRE/TEXT that same year. The letter itself is wonderfully vivid, both in its typed main content and in its handwritten marginalia. Berthoff’s reading flourishes the white spaces in response to Bizzell’s heartfelt inquiries. I value the letter as an important artifact representing a meeting of influential minds in comp/rhet as they wrestle with deconstruction and Peircean triadicity during the “social turn.”
In the letter, Bizzell writes to Berthoff: “You usually talk about imagination in terms of the individual, and you often show the power of imagination operating on either objects from the natural world or abstractions, both classes of things that do not seem to be culture-bound.” Berthoff pens emphatically in the marginalia, circling “things”: “But their MEANING is!” (“From Pat Bizzell to Ann Berthoff, 18 November 1986”). Bizzell clearly thinks here in
dichotomous terms: “the individual” gestures to the social/individual split we identified in the last chapter as problematic. To think in terms of “social,” or “cultural” in this instance, versus “individual” is a misconstruance stemming from a postmodern semiosis. But there is more going on here. In this passage, Bizzell understands “natural world objects” and “abstractions” in dyadic terms. The “natural world objects,” by Bizzell’s reasoning, can be accessed directly by the senses. No “culture” necessary. “Culture,” in this view, seems to be something separate, belonging to a “social” world independent of an individual one. It is constructive, I think, to consider Bizzell’s inclusion of “abstraction” in terms of a dialogue/dialectic split. Here
“abstraction” is an idea belonging solely to a mind. Dialectical. It is closed off, “sealed from the complexity of the world” as Dobrin and Jensen put it regarding the “nondiscursive mode” in their volume Abducting Writing Studies.26 Bizzell seems to conceive of “Abstraction” as the product of dialectic, a dialectic process free from dialogue, a “thing” somehow free from externality, independent of “cultural meaning.”
In the Bizzell letter artifact, the marginalia suggest that for Berthoff, the terms “context” and “cultural” do not prove interchangeable in a useful way. “Meaning,” for Berthoff does not happen as a process between minds, or “in” one; “dialogue” does not happen free from
“dialectic,” and vice versa. The meaning resources developed in both situations inform the other, simultaneously, allatonce, in a process of dynamic reciprocity. Bizzell is right when she
identifies that Berthoff locates “imagination” in an individual. “Individual” here can be understood as the particular, unique formationing of perceptions and thoughts (both nondiscursive and discursive) at any given place and time—those particular perceptions actualizing through the mediation of prior perceptions and conceptions, allatonce.
Earlier in the letter, Bizzell questions one of the initial “assignments” offered in
Berthoff’s FTW, the natural objects observation journal (13)27. This assignment asks students to spend 10 minutes each day for a week writing their observations of a natural object (that must be “organic,” the promise of change, even minute, lending purpose to repeated observation). When Bizzell writes about “classes of things that do not seem to be culture-bound,” she seems to construe the “natural object” as the text of importance in the exercise. Actually, I think this is probably a common misunderstanding of Berthoff’s “dialectical notebook” as well. For Berthoff, however, what’s important in the exercise is not the natural object, but the writer’s mind in action, perceiving the object—the way the mind perceives form in the thinking-through-writing. It’s an event. The language itself, the acts of mind cultivated in the perceiving of the object—the remembering, feeling, seeing, hearing, comparing, classifying, rejecting, etc.—all actions of mind engaging simultaneously in presence with the object (in context). And all of this is mediated and mediating. Some of this action manifests as/through language. Turning students’ attention to the nature of language and signification as it works them—through them, by them— that’s an attention to the way culture is entailed in all acts of signification.
I know from experience, teaching FTW and the “organic object” journal exercise to freshmen at Georgia State University, that when we turn attention to the writing and ask: What is your writing doing here? What is your mind doing here? Why? These questions naturally lead to discussions of what binds us (cultural norms) and what distinguishes us (our histories and personal experiences and perspectives). The dialectic inside individual minds, inscribed on the page, becomes outward dialogue, simultaneously. And if students just listen, or take notes,
27 This popular activity is the one centering Rutherford and Palmeri’s chapter “‘The Things They Left Behind’: Toward an Object-Oriented History of Composition,” explicated in chapter five of this dissertation project.
pulling the language and meaning resources of their fellow students from dialogue into their own “chaos,” those meaning resources become the stuff of dialectic, too.
To characterize Berthoff’s work as “one-dimensional,” as the stuff of “dialectic” and internality, “the personal,” or the “objective,” somehow free from “culture,” is a misconstruance that keeps Berthoff’s work from manifesting fully in the field of comp/rhet. For embracing “dialectic as audit-of-meaning” as rhetorical method—one that resists cleaving “dialogue” from “dialectic,” “inner” from “outer,” “style” from “content,” “cognition” from “affect,” invention” from “delivery,” “individual” from “society”—opens the concept of dialectic to interactions between meanings simultaneously “internal” and “external.” A triadic semiotics demands that all signs are mediated by meanings that are socially, historically, and culturally informed. So, for Berthoff, the internal act of interpretation is always “culturally bound” and key to all meaning making.