Abstract

Composition's recent turn toward cultural studies a research methodology and a pedagogy grows out of an interest in imagining the democratic potentials of rhetoric.1 James Berlin had been one of the compositionists at the forefront of theorizing composition's uses of cultural studies. In Poststructuralism, Cultural Studies, and the Composition Classroom, for example, Berlin laid out the project of a cultural studies pedagogy, stating that must come to see that the languages they are expected to speak, write, and embrace ways of thinking and acting are never disinterested, always bringing with them strictures on the existent, the good, the possible, and regimes of power (24). Yet the roadblocks to such a project in composition in particular and cultural studies in general are that recognitions of the of language can also narrow the possibilities for transformative critical engagements. In the extreme, recognizing the structural interestedness of language, its claims on who we are and what we can do, generates only resignation and indifference. As Lester Faigley writes, the profound cynicism of many students concerning public responsibilities suggests to some the possibility that as society is increasingly saturated with ever expanding quantities of information, objects, and services, the space for the autonomous subject with a capacity for critical thought collapses (213). problem confronting compositionists working with cultural studies today is thus one of actualizing democratic opportunities anticipated in the critical study of cultural sign systems. What opportunities does cultural studies provide compositionists for critically reimagining their pedagogical and research responses to the interestedness of language practices? Our response is to say that cultural studies can offer critical redirections of the ideological motivations for contemporary rhetorics when it conceptualizes those rhetorics in terms of their civic settings. Berlin had already noted the significance of place to rhetoric in an earlier article on the historiography of rhetoric, where he remarked: The ability to read, write, and speak in accordance with the code sanctioned by a culture's ruling class is the main work of education, and this is true whether we are discussing ancient Athens or modern Detroit (52). What is most interesting for our purposes about Berlin's quotation is that he suggests