The Subject in Discourse

Clifford, John. "The Subject in Discourse." Contending with Words: Composition in a Postmodern Age. New York: MLA, 1991. 38-51.

I have two interests in this article. The first is in Clifford's history of "the subject" in the twentieth century; the second is Clifford's own project to transform composition pedagogy into a more "critical" practice. I'll deal mostly with the first interest since it provides additional background I need for my own understanding of the "subject who writes and who is written." [My own quotes but from somewhere?] However, Clifford's project in this essay seems so dated to me—so postmodern in its own "ideology"—that I am interested in my own reaction to this piece at this moment in 2008. But more about that in a moment.

The "subject" is a term to describe the writer's consciousness as he or she writes—their body and thoughts as they are expressed on the page. I'll be blunt about my own concern related to "the subject." If rhetorical reflection, as I suppose, represents a "reactivation" of invention within the act of writing, we HAVE to have some idea about what it means for a writer to "invent." Postmodernism basically castrated the subject, leaving invention outside the realm of "the subject." If I am to make my claim, I need to "rescue the subject" from these postmodern claims. However, I can't just return to a romantic version of the creative genius on a hero quest within their own psyche to grasp the ultimate boon. No.

But on to Clifford's 101 about the history of "the subject" in the 20th century. He actually spends little time setting the baseline of the "romantic subject." Here is his clearest description of this traditional view of "the subject":
For the traditional humanist, the writer has always been seen as a creative individual, the locus of signification, the originator or meaning, an autonomous being, aware of ends and means, of authorial intentions and motivations. Traditional and expressivist rhetorical theory, in fact, unproblematically assumes that the individual writer is free, beyond the contingencies of history and language, to be an authentic and unique consciousness. (Clifford 39)
These two sentences represent Clifford's summary of the autonomous self. I must admit I am guilty of holding this view of the writing subject because this description (to a degree) represents my experience as a writer. I never presumed to the god-like power of any sort of unique consciousness, but it was my consciousness and I was creating and inventing meanings authentic and unique to me (though shaped of course by outside influences) just as I am now.

Clifford goes on to recount the dismantling of this traditional humanist view of the subject. He starts by discussing the structuralist, mentioning Claude Levi-Strauss and Roland Barthes in particular. These structuralist, he says, "cast doubt on the autonomy of the freely choosing individual by positing instead a subject created or written by linguistic, sociological, and anthropological codes" (40). He goes on to state: "Writing [for the structuralist] does not directly express an individual's ideas; it transmits universal codes" (40). I'm not as well versed on Barthes and the structuralists as I ought to be, but this description reminds me of Joseph Campbell asserting in The Hero with a Thousand Faces that there is a universal code—the hero monomyth—that we find within stories from across the globe. Epics and myths express some sort of psychological (Campbell would assert with a nod to Jung's archetypes) universal experience of humanity and the human consciousness. Clifford goes on to lump Lacan with post-structuralist and neo-Marxist, but I see his work fitting more with this psychological perspective. I may not understand Lacan, but he seems essentially Freudian in his structuralist assessment of the subject:
Lacan, for example, develops a materialist theory of the speaker, or the speaking subject, where the "I" that enunciates differs from the ego that employs the "I." … The subject position one enters through language never fully reveals itself since the unconscious always displaces and condenses through linguistic masks as metaphor and metonymy." (40)
The subject is controlled by the ego and unconscious in ways it is unaware of consciously.

After this summary of the structuralist undercutting of the autonomous subject, he moves to discuss the post-structuralist "(re)vision." He mentions that post-structuralists were skeptical of the structuralists "general transhistorical systems of meaning"—i.e. any sort of universal force influencing the subject such as archetypes or the unconscious:
Meaning is thereby made situational and relational. Everything depends on the specific institution where the discourse takes place; in varying contexts the same words are radically transformed to mean one thing and then another. Poststructuralism, then, decenters writing as well as the self, seeing both not only as effect of language patterns but as the result of multiple discourses already in place, already overdetermined by historical and social meanings in constant internal struggle. (40)
With the poststructuralist, to include neo-Marxist and Deconstructionist, we have the postmodern critique of the autonomous subject. The critique seems to have three linch pins. First, that culture, ideology, and language (which contains both) determine the "subject"—what the writer thinks and says. Second, that no situation is universal and thus each situation is unique. Contingency rules and meaning or truth is dependent upon the particulars of the situation in which the meaning is expressed (dissio logio). Third, that language itself is uncertain; our filling of the gap between sign and signified is not fixed and can be undone by multiple alternatives to that equation we call meaning. Meaning itself is a fiction. He mentions Derrida, in particular, in reference to this third critique: "Derrida similarly displaces the subject from the center, for example, in his notion of difference where attempts to define linguistic signifiers create an endless postponement of presence, an endless play of signification. For Derrida, one signifier gives way to another so that meaning is always relational, always changing" (40). Any meaning, any assertion of "presence" can be countered with another meaning which language allows. Clifford gives shortshrift to the first critique about the power of culture and ideology to determine the meanings found and expressed by the subject with a nod to Foucault and not a mention at all of Bakhtin. He sums of the result of the poststructuralist, postmodern destruction of the humanist subject with this statement: "As a result, the independent and private consciousness formerly endowed with plentitude and presence, with a timeless and transcultural essence, becomes in postmodern thought a decentered subject constantly being called on to inhabit overdetermined positions, the implications of which can be only dimly grasped by a consciousness written by multiple, shifting codes" (40-41). The strawman view of this debate has on one side the subject who "creates" from a private agency within and the subject who is "created" by outside forces determining from the outside. Postmodernism would place greater agency on those forces from outside that determine the subject. Is it any wonder, then, with this postmodern perspective that invention became a dormant concern in composition/rhetoric? Invention became a naïve impossibility, supplanted by a heroic struggle against the ideologies that would oppress and determine the writer—perhaps a losing battle or an idealistic crusade for "justice."

The post-postmodern correction to this stripping of the subject's agency is to return some control to the writer, to acknowledge that in the face of these multiple outside influences the writer still shapes and forms their meaning in ways determined (to a degree) by themselves. Helen Foster's conception of "networked subjectivity" as well as Anis Bawarshi's conception of genre's interaction with the subject present alternative, broader views of the writer who writes and is written. Each presents "invention" as a form of negotiation that must be accomplished by the writer as he or she writes; where the writer has some power in this negotiation process. Thus, we have the reawakening of invention in writing studies.

To do Clifford justice, he doesn't fall into a narrow postmodern position that agency for the writer completely is determined from the outside, though he seems thoroughly neo-Marxist in his distrust of ideology's oppressive influence and the need for the writer to resist this oppression. He's all about ideology and hegemony and power. He bases the largest part of his thinking upon Althusser and his 1971 essay "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatus." He likes Althusser's position that "destigmatizes ideology as natural and inevitable" (41). So much of my experience with ideological criticism seems to present ideology as a bad thing—ew, that's ideological and thus bad implicitly. Seeing ideology as "natural" defines it as something like Burke's notion of the "terministic screen." It is an agreed upon perspective that through its terms, understandings, and conventions shapes a world view and beliefs. By its nature it includes as it excludes, allows as it disallows, names as it leaves unnamed. An ideology is a construct, socially negotiated and socially maintained. Quoting Althusser, Clifford says, "ideology represents 'the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence'" (42). OK, call it imaginary, but it still shapes how we see the world and interact within it, which means it is another word for reality.

Now to what seems so dated about Clifford's ideological critique of composition/rhetoric. I can't deny the validity of his criticism of composition teaching practices that he attacks, but I hear his critiques with a different ear that isn't so full of the terministic screen of ideological criticism. Instead, I have been influenced by Anis Bawarshi's Genre & The Invention of the Writer and her equation of structures with genre's. Bawarshi expands our understanding of genres from simple forms and even from recurring situations that generate these forms to genre as an ontologically and epistemologically shaping structure. Genre's are expressions of ideology; ideology is in kind of genre—a shaped structure that shapes. Thus, Clifford's critique of the writing subject in so much of composition/rhetoric could be really reduced to a criticism of the genre of writing held dear by so many writing teachers. This quote from Clifford sounds so much like Bawarshi to me in the sense that form equals genre and the nature of genre to shape writers: "But form is also an attitude toward reality; it is rhetorical power, a way to shape experience, and as such it constructs subjects" (43). Genre invents the writer. Clifford blasts the traditional academic essay for the "attitude toward reality" that it "fictionalizes": "it constructs subjects who assume that knowledge can be demonstrated merely by asserting a strong thesis and supporting it with three concrete points. But rarely is truth the issue. Writing subjects learn that the panoply of discourse conventions are, in fact, the sin qua non, that adherence to ritual is the real ideological drama being enacted" (43). Clifford's critique of form and ritual here seems analogous to blasting an ideology for being an ideology. Granted, he blasts the five paragraph essay for an illusion of establishing truth, but what in fact is the genre supposed to do and be within its context. It is, after all, a teaching-genre, a school-based form of writing intended to accomplish particular goals within the particular context of the school classroom. As such, it has its own validity despite its weaknesses from a larger discourse and epistemological viewpoint.

The way out is not necessarily to blast the academic essay with all its rules, conventions and rituals. As teachers of students writing within an academic context, we need to equip our students with proficiency in this kind of writing (Bartholomae would agree). But we also need to equip our students with an expanded awareness of this kind of writing as a genre. We need to equip our students with a knowledge of how genres function and how students need to interrogate a writing task in terms of genre—whatever that writing task might be. Clifford seems to arrive at this same position, but he expresses it in ideological terms. He talks about "raising their consciousness about the ideological dimensions of rhetoric" and "helping student to read and write and think in ways that both resist domination and exploitation and encourage self-consciousness about who they are and can be in the social world" (51). Yes. We should encourage self-consciousness that the writer is operating within a construct, a genre that generates desires and motivations that to a degree create the writer as the writer creates the genres. But no, in the sense that genres like ideologies are evil for being dominating and exploiting—every genre and every ideology can be critiqued for that fault. The challenge for the writer who writes, for the subject who writes as they are being written, is to negotiate (to invent) their position within that genre. That's what we need to teach.