Rescuing the Subject

Miller, Susan. Rescuing the Subject: A Critical Introduction to Rhetoric and the Writer. Carbondale: Southern Illinois Press, 2004. (2004 paperback 2nd edition, originally published 1989).

Susan Miller's project in this text predominantly is to refigure the rhetorical tradition to highlight the significance of writing as opposed to oratory in how we conceive this tradition and how we understand "the subject"--i.e. the writer who writes. Do we conceive of the writer and what the writer is about through the lens of a rhetorical tradition dominated by concerns and figurations of oratory, or do we see the writer through a lens of "textual rhetoric?" It seems clear to me from how she ends the text and her special focus on Mina Shaughnessy and the struggles of developmental writers that she is discussing what I might call "textual literacy." She means the cognitive and linguistic skills to read and write text on a page. By recasting the rhetorical tradition and illuminating the prominence of thinking and philosophizing about the written word all the way back to Plato, Miller is "rescuing" the writer (the subject who writes) from a tradition biased toward the spoken word. She valorizes the scholarly study of the written word as unique. Charles Bazerman seems to be the most prominent scholar in "discourse studies" who has extended Miller's project in terms of research (though I could be wrong).

I recall a comment that John Schilb made in the video Take 20 about the difficulty Composition Studies (or Writing Studies) will have in the face of our modern transformation in literacy to a "new media" literacy. In the face of multi-modal texts, he said, we will face special challenges to define the nature of and relevance of written texts. He might have just been conservative here--guarding his traditional bastion of disciplinary work--but I think he speaks from the perspective of Miller's "textual rhetoric." Schilb's comment makes me wonder if Composition really ranges within the narrow walls of "textual rhetoric" or if it should range beyond just words on the page. I think this question is one of the largest questions facing Freshman Composition classes around the country. Perhaps some innovative teachers have broadened into new media literacy in both reception (critical reading) and production (critical "writing") of new media "texts," but I would guess that the majority of "English" teachers teaching writing have not. I know I can't claim to have made this transformation (though I peck at the edges), and I certainly don't see it amongst my colleagues. These musings make me wonder if Miller's point to recover writing in the rhetorical tradition isn't to a degree moot now. The problem now is that we use textual paradigms (print-based literacy) to describe and understand the new form of new media literacy. What is "remediation" after all but this way of using one construct to formulate another construct.

I want to return to the title of Miller's work--rescuing the subject. My interest in this book was predominantly in the title. I am interested in various conceptualizations of "the subject"--the writer who writes, the thinking agent who puts words to page. For my own research focus, I will have to present my own conceptualization of "the subject" since implicit in my understanding of process and reflection is a writer who makes decisions and choices about their writing. My special affinity with cognitive views toward composition (Flower and Hayes) presumes a thinking subject with power over how they conceive their own sense of reality. I think this cognitive tradition can be too narrowly reduced to the "unified self." Flower's own expansion into the "social cognitive theory of writing" is about taking into account these "outside" influences on writers.

I must say that Miller's thoughts on this issue of "the subject" are disappointing. However, she does describe the dynamic of the modernist "unified subject" theory and the post-modernist, deconstructionist indeterminant subject who faces being "written" by culture, conventions, and language itself. Let's see if I can find a few quotes:

"In this broader space, an originating presence to a text, the forgotten writer, is more complex than the individual and imaginatively 'masculine' subject, who we conceive of as an independent, potentially totalizing, univocal source of statements. It has been a relief, not just a logical linguistic and theoretical conclusion, to proclaim the recent 'death' of that figure.

The writer who enlarges our vision of what it means specifically to explain written discourse lives ... in a complex textual world. The writer knows especially about convention, precedents, and 'anxieties of influence,' the control of already written language over both meaning and the further actual results of writing. The writer, who is admittedly a fiction whose existence is never called into play outside a theoretically conceived writing event, both originates with, and results from, a written text. ... this writer simultaneously sacrifices 'meaning' to the resistance of written language, and written language to 'meaning,' in actual, time-bound performances." (15)

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"The premises for this theoretical proposal are that writing cannot now be imagined only as a 'medium' for direct communication from a singular individual, and that it is always the living embodiment of a risk whose description must vary historically, but which is always the province of a textual 'actor' taking in hand a language that in fact can only fictionalize such assertive control." (36)
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"I have assumed that working out this theory of writers historically, philosophically, and in terms of definitions of rhetoric will contribute to ongoing reconceptualizations within compositions studies because I take the act of writing to be still somewhat hidden in the persistent convention that writing only 'contains' individual speech or thought. Most theorists and teachers of written composition still unquestioningly emphasize a direct connection between thought and spoken-to-written language. Many lament the difference between 'authors' and the halting textual voices of imitative ... student writing. They aim to produce 'student writers' who write and read 'for themselves,' assuming that a thesis may be 'stated' with discernible clarity, coherence, and completeness. Composition, more than any other textual study, necessarily confronts writing as discovery, as play, and as process because it faces unstable student texts that have been written by those who seem to know only their own oral culture. But common practices in the field persistently honor oppositions to discovery, play, and process: product, seriousness, and perfect communication. Even the most enlightened often relegate the instabilities of writing to 'pedagogy' while retaining in their descriptions of 'rhetoric' an ideal of assertive and stable texts.

Alternatives to these tacit assumptions and their results depend on reconceiving both student writers and the act of writing." (150)
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I think the missing link, or undeveloped promise, of Miller's book is its application in the classroom. She does a lot for the scholarly study of written communication, but only holds out a changed premise for writing teachers. It is up to the writing teacher to see where this new premise--the reconception of student writers and the act of writing--will take their pedagogy. From the quote above, it appears she offers a solidly "process" pedagogy as an alternative to current-traditional pedagogy by opposing process vs. product, play vs. seriousness, and discovery vs. perfect communication (if this last pair fit). From my perspective in 2008, I find this a disappointing way to reduce her thoughts on teaching. It is her enhances sensitivity to what is involved in the act of writing, her presentation of an expanded picture of the writer and writing with a long tradition behind it, that makes her book important. I keep coming back to Foster's "networked subjectivity," and I think that Miller would probably like Foster's notions of the writer.