After this quarter and reading some Burke and Foucault, I’m beginning to think quite a bit about how language is action. As a discipline, English, Rhetoric and Composition all too often views “artifacts” as products, not as actions. Thus, Bakhtin notes that we analyze texts as having one voice, because they are products. I think that doing this does some damage. This is what I wrote in a journal entry on Burke’s “Terministic Screens” earlier this quarter:
…Burke equates all discourse as action, rather than just “conveying information.“ Of course, some discourse is obviously actions (sic) (e.g., “I swear“), but others, it is not obviously so. That language “does things“ is a common trope in essays and books I read, but no one takes the next step to admit that language is action, that every time we speak or write, we are acting, we are creating, dividing, composing, excluding, including…
This is what I just wrote a bit ago for my assessment of my journals for the entire year (and directly after quoting that in the assessment):
As I begin to shape myself, my pedagogy, and my ideology, I’ve begun to realize that I must a) be informed of what has come before us and how it has shaped and informed us, and b) acknowledge that every action I take is either reinforcing something or acting against something. If language is action, as I believe, then I must become careful in how I use it. I noticed that some theorists we read criticized the shift of language from action to product, and I think I am beginning to see the effects of this. By making language products, in my mind at least, we do not admit to its power. If a book is an act, we must be conscious of what it does. If a book is a product, we do not have to think about how it reinforces certain values, actions, or beliefs.
So, instead of analyzing “products” and “artifacts,” perhaps we should be analyzing “actions”? I don’t know how much has been said on this by others (and I imagine it has been said), but I think it’s something that we need to change.
