Politics, Pedagogy, and the Profession of Composition ... - JAC Online

Bruce Horner 123
ing conceptions has been foregrounded in attempts to address the dilemma
of how to enact a feminist pedagogy eschewing claims of authority
and power while operating from a position of institutional authority and
power (as, say, a tenured professor). In an echo of Bizzell, Carmen Luke,
for example, observes, "Feminist pedagogy, conceptualized as (maternal)
nurture and distanced from claims of pedagogical authority and institutional
power, leaves itself wide open to the theoretical impossibility of
having a 'foundation' from which to arbitrate knowledges, student voices
and experiences, and the teacher's own epistemological position" ("Feminist
Pedagogy" 284). This dilemma arises at least in part from a conflict
between a notion of power relations as inescapable, and hence to be
engaged directly, and a view of power relations as something that can and
should be escaped. 1
Aside from mixing definitions of politics and the competition among
these definitions, a third and more significant source of confusion in the
debate on the politics of composition stems from the failure to understand
the politics of specific acts in terms of the material conditions of their
specific sites and in relation to the conditions of the larger spheres
encompassing those sites. We are only beginning to question, and
articulate, the political effectivity of action at one social and historical site
in relation to other sites. Typically, arguments about the politics of
pedagogy, the profession, the academy, or society either treat these sites
as discrete or, at best, assume a relation of homology among them. Such
arguments frequently invoke a dominant, monolithic, reified notion of
power, a notion that undermines, by either inflating or understating,
pedagogical and professional politics. Instead of viewing power as
relational, power is imagined as a commodity-something some have or
acquire and use on others, or else something some attempt to share with
or give to others to "empower" them (see Gore 56-58; A. Luke, 322).
Accordingly, those with less power in relation to those with greater power
are imagined as effectively powerless, and the act of giving power
becomes fraught with ethical dilemmas: the giver is ethically suspect for
having power in the first place; and giving power itself is suspect for
encouraging complicity with the dominant power structure. For example,
Carmen Luke offers an account of the dilemma facing feminists committed
to principled disregard for the institutional power that they are now
authorized to wield.
This same view of power in compositional work as a discrete rather
than relational force is also manifested in the perspective that holds that
the politics of composition studies has to do only with the profession and