Schenectady Synecdoche

For the kind of work I do, causal arguments are a trap into which I must neither fall nor be led. As I work on the socioeconomic conditions for the rise of composition, I have to be very careful not to fall into a causality trap. —Not because causality doesn't exist in the world, but because I could never establish it as a relationship between these two subjects. —And in fact because I suspect that the relationship is not causal.

The dangers are substantial. With the work I do in authorship (asking why plagiarism is so important to our culture; looking at the enabling metaphors of the discourse of academic integrity; exploring the internal contradictions in plagiarism definitions and policies; and challenging the widely disparate types of textual activity that are lumped together under the term plagiarism), readers have sometimes lept to causal conclusions—among them that I actually approve of and wish to enable plagiarists. Something of the same reductive logic is inevitable here: that because I'm exploring the socioeconomic conditions in which composition arose and because I am arguing for their correlation, readers may take me to assert that ours is a racist discipline that should be abandoned.

Which is not the case. At least here in the early going of this research, I'm thinking that indeed our discipline's nineteenth-century emergence is deeply implicated in xenophobic, racist, imperialist, classist movements in the post-bellum U.S. It's not hard, I think, to detect an ongoing relationship between these fields of activity, one that continues to the present day. But to remove myself from one of those fields is not to solve the problem, because the problem is not causal. Nor is it to remove myself from the problem, because I am still a resident in and participant in the culture in which these discourses circulate. What I am searching for is understanding, in the hope that with that understanding I can contribute to social change. Inserting altered understandings and representations into one point within mutually informing discourses disrupts the smooth, invisible circulation of those discourses; alters their direction, perhaps in ways that can be directed, even controlled, toward the objective of disabling the hierarchies that they support.

Butler's argument, incidentally, is worth revisiting in the context of the current attention to Ward Churchill's argument about 9/11. Those with online database privileges for the SU Library can access Butler's article here.

Cross-posted to HistoryBump.