Lunsford and Ede: things in relation to other things

Representing Audience: “Successful” Discourse and Disciplinary Critique

--Andrea A. Lunsford and Lisa Ede

I'm on Lunsford and Ede blog duty this week, and I’ll get there, I promise, but I wanted to begin with Trimbur’s “Consensus and Difference in Collaborative Learning,” which opens with the casting of consensus as villain.  Trimbur refers to group think and totalitarianism; I started to think of the many ways this idea is echoed in pop culture: the Borg in Star Trek, the Party in 1984, the agents in The Matrix, Skynet in the Terminator universe, zombies in anything with zombies. As Trimbur points out, collaborative learning often falls into this anti-individualistic line of critique: anything that overstates or privileges the social is denying (or forcibly suppressing) the value of the individual.  Just like the Borg—coming to assimilate all human distinctiveness.   

But Trimbur focuses on a second line of critique, one with ties to Bruffee.  According to Trimbur, Bruffee advocates the negotiation of consensus through conversation and  collaborative learning as a way for students to partake in a community of knowledgeable peers/acclimatize to normal discourse.  Trimbur highlights the critique of the left-wing: that this view of collaborative conversation replaces the authority of the individual with the authority of the discourse community—a normative community that decides who can speak, what constitutes meaningful speech/writing, and who can be privy to certain kinds of knowledge.   As a result, Trimbur calls for a recasting of the way we see consensus: “We will need…to look at collaborative learning not merely as a process of consensus-making but more important as a process of identifying differences and locating these differences in relation to each other” (741).  

Now here’s the swing to Lunsford and Ede.  In their essay they focus not on the critique of another scholar’s work, but rather they revisit an essay of their own (“Audience Addressed/Audience Invoked: The Role of Audience in Composition Theory and Pedagogy), not to create an old-bad, new-good binary but to “embrace multiple understandings” (814).  Their essay explores the ways their previous perspectives and assumptions stood in relationship to their arguments.  For example:   

·      The influence of romantic, western notions of individual agency in the definition of success

·      Their own personal schooling experiences and the impact of their struggles in the way they framed audience and student experience in AA/AI

·      The way their understanding of writing led to certain assumptions about meaning, knowledge, and interactions within discourse communities (“such an understanding of writing assumes a negotiation of meaning among if not literal equals then among those with equal access to the resources of language” [816])

  Lunsford and Ede advocate for a critical approach that takes into account “the locatedness and situatedness of all texts,” AKA, the politics of location.  Things in relation to other things.  These two are noted proponents of collaboration—I would go so far as to say they are champions of collaboration—but in their essay, they highlight as problematic a view of communication that “casts misunderstanding, miscommunication, disagreement, resistance, and dissent as failure and, as such, that which is to be avoided or ‘cured’” (818).  This is not the Borg view, the consensus-at-all-cost-comform-comform-comform view. I would frame it as a working example of Trimbur’s view of dissent: consensus should be approached as a way to generate difference, to identify institutionally authorized systems that dictate the very idea of differences.

Consensus (in the Trimbur universe) is a kind of utopian ideal were one identifies the relations of power structures.  Trimbur uses the example of a literature classroom, and how instead of coming to a “consensus” about the right way to read a text, students should be encouraged to explore the categories of literature vs. the categories of non-literature.  How did these categories form?  Who made them?  How have they (students) been taught to read and categorize and define and talk about literature?

In my view, both the Lunsford and Ede essay and the Trimbur piece tie into a theme we’ve been exploring in class: the dangers of having one theoretical alliance; one definitive model for writing; one explanation for the thought-speech-writing relationship; or even one “basic” definition for all these theories we’ve been looking into.  To go to this ONE model / definition / articulation, we ignore the idea of relationships: how things define themselves in relation to other things.