A Day of *Unruly Rhetorics* at UC Irvine
Friday, May 13, 2016 — Irvine, CA
The UCI Rhetoric and Composition Graduate Collective excitedly hosted two guest speakers — Paula Mathieu of Boston College and Nancy Welch of the University of Vermont — as well as attendees from institutions across Southern California for a full-day of conversations about politics, activism, rhetorical education, and pedagogy on Friday, May 13, 2016. The event, a capstone of the yearly rhetoric reading group, about which you can read more here, offered both new objects of study and new theoretical inroads for naming and understanding the work we can or should do as teachers of writing and rhetoric in our classrooms; exploring the relationship between that work and politics and social change; discerning how our specific disciplinary strengths and methodologies are and can be activist; and imagining, designing, and working towards more just futures with our students.
At the start of her morning lecture, entitled “Writing for Living and Dying and Struggling and Changing,” Paula Mathieu offered an invitation to be truly present and together with one another. Citing a recent visit to her campus by MIT Professor Sherry Turkle, Paula argued that at the heart of her activist work have always been relationships, the kinds that — as research like Turkle’s suggest — are potentially threatened by using technology to distract or distance ourselves from one another.
In order to articulate both her personal history as a scholar/teacher/activist and to argue for relationship-building-as-activism, Paula began by offering an intellectual genealogy — from an uncomfortable brush with a disciplining barista and the constrictive discourse of gourmet coffee to Herbert Marcuse, to J.L. Austin and what Paula called “[t]his idea of naming what one has no right to name.” She then generously shared a series of memories and traced her friendships with people who were instrumental in helping her find her way through graduate school and beyond. Paula introduced us, for example, to her friend Joel Alfassa, whose colorful and assertive voice helped lead her to Streetwise, the newspaper written and sold by the homeless community in Chicago where Paula would do work that mattered to her and begin to make sense of how to research that work in ethical, respectful, and efficacious ways. Paula described not wanting to work in the realm of “trickle down activism,” teaching with a political slant.
“Writers like Jim Berlin, Alan France, Patricia Williams, Jim Sledd, Michael Blitz and Claude Hurlbert, Cy Knoblauch, Lil Brannon, bell hooks, and Elspeth Stuckey were my introduction to what living out commitments in rhetoric and writing studies could look like.” — Paula Mathieu
Paula also told about “meeting” her good friend Diana George, also, incidentally, first through Diana’s writing. Her friendship with Diana evolved through archive work together, and her respect for Diana bloomed when watching Diana rewrite a conference paper in its entirety the night before her panel at the 2003 Conference on College Composition and Communication in New York in response to George Bush’s declaration of war against Iraq. Reflecting on this moment, wherein she watched her colleague and friend grapple with “what [it meant] to be a rhetorician in a time of war,” Paula lamented what she sees as a turn in the field away from “the power of language, the value of debate, the importance of deliberation, careful analysis and thoughtful response,” “the things that drew, and still draw [her], to the study and teaching of rhetoric.”
For Paula, activism involves three things: 1) “building relationships that improve the health of the community”; 2) practicing “restraint [and] empathy” while keeping “egos…in check”; and 3) accepting “joy, creativity, and sometimes very slow research.” To illustrate these concepts in action, Paula ended her talk by practicing what she called “circulation activism,” using her time and position at the podium to amplify the voices and the reach of the work of some of her less prominent or more precarious colleagues. She highlighted the work that Veronica House, a non-tenure track instructor and the Director of WISE (Writing, Engagement, and Service Learning) at CU-Boulder, is doing with local food activism through partnerships between university students and the local community; the time, effort, labor, and love Jessica Restaino, a writer and teacher at Montclair State University, has recently put into recording, managing, and carefully sharing the secrets and memories of a friend and research subject, Susan Lundy; and initiatives by Tamera Marko, who writes and teaches at Emerson College, to travel, archive, collect, and share stories from poor and displaced women in Medellin, Colombia who cannot circulate their own narratives.
You can hear Paula’s talk in full here:
Nancy Welch’s afternoon lecture, “Who’s Afraid of Bread and Roses?: Lessons from Lawrence for Today’s Civility Wars,” offered a deep historical interrogation of a term we often take for granted: civility. Placing the word in the context of political speech, Nancy questioned the work that “civility” can do to pacify or quiet unruly protesters: Whose speech gets marked as unruly, and how does the fetishization of civility divert attention away from their demands?
Civility, Nancy reminded us, is a subjective judgment and not a universal good. To illustrate, she offered the example of the Raging Grannies, an anti-nuclear group who were accused of disorderly conduct, having a mob mentality, and being potentially violent after they disrupted a status report presentation regarding the Indian Point nuclear plant by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) with their sing-songy chants and calls to shut down the plant. Nancy challenged the idea that the Grannies, though potentially uncivil and unruly, constituted a threat to the safety of NRC officials or others. Their unruliness, she maintained, spoke truth to power in a closed-off system; their lack of civility opened up a space for them to be heard in a rhetorical situation which denied them an opportunity to speak. In contrast, Nancy offered the example of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge occupiers, unruly protesters who called not for a public good but for the re-privatization of public goods. She asked if these movements were of the same kind, if there was substance to the claim circulated around the Malheur occupation (falsely attributed by mainstream media to Ammon Bundy, a leader of the Malheur occupation) that they were “doing the same thing as Rosa Parks did.”
To approach this question, Nancy historicized “civility” by returning to the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and public perceptions, fed by misleading accounts, of the Wobblies’ political interventions. Though accused of being “radical,” “lawless,” “desperate,” and secretive, the Wobblies, Nancy argued, actually posed a “threat” because of their very public and very effective organizational strategies: the use of art and iconography; the publication and distribution of newspapers, leaflets, handbills, and songbooks in various languages; and the implementation of mass direct actions. Their prominent public presence led to conflicts over free speech, the right to speak versus the right to not have to listen. Calls to silence the Wobblies — calls for civility — functioned to maintain the existing order of oppression, to reprivatize public debate, and to civilize unruly workers.
For Nancy, at issue with both the Raging Grannies/Malheur Refuge occupation and the IWW/anti-labor movements is discernment: How do we distinguish between the tactics and rhetorics of unruly speech used by one group and those used by another? How do we differentiate between breaches of civility that threaten systems of power and established orders and those which threaten personal safety or public well-being?
Nancy offered John Thompson’s “depth hermeneutics,” an approach to rhetorical analysis, as one means of discernment. Marrying historical and social investigations with formal analysis, depth hermeneutics introduces ethics to the act of reading or interpreting. Nancy then turned to Leon Trotsky’s assertion, “A means can be justified only by its end. But the end in turn must also be justified,” to ground the question of ethics. The difference then between Raging Grannies and Malheur Refuge occupiers is not just one of means — uncivil or unruly action — but also one of ends: the “[abolition] of a corporation’s anti-democratic power, [the creation of] public decision-making rights about energy and the environment, [and the valuation of] ‘being’ over ‘having’” versus the “[reprivatization of] public lands and the [guaranteeing of the] individual (white) and profit-making prerogative over the uses of that land, including for increased mineral extraction.”
Nancy reminded us — as rhetors and teachers of rhetoric and as activists or people who engage with activist work — to read deeply into the contexts, the means and ends, and the parties invested in political interventions. She reminded us of the necessity of asking “Whose civility? Whose ends?” and “Who is [actually] afraid of bread and roses?”
You can hear Nancy’s talk in full here:
And you can view her presentation slides here:
We closed the day’s events with a visit to a temporary extension of Speaking Up: Fifty Years of Student Publications at UCI, an exhibit showcasing student writing throughout the history of the campus co-curated by the RCGC.
You can read more about the exhibit and how you can visit it here.
