I just read Sánchez’s essay, “Composition Ideology Apparatus: A Critique,” which is a nice follow up to Althusser, which I read a few weeks ago. I was, quite honestly, somewhat confused at times throughout the essay, but I think I got the main points, which I might quote/summarize here:
“In Berlin’s work, the elevation of ideology theory happens at the expense of rhetorical theory, as rhetoric is identified in this scheme as merely the distributor of hegemonic goods…. [O]ntological ideology theory, concerned to articulate a hermeneutic vision of being, will not be able to understand textual rhetoric” (753).
Sánchez critiques Althusser’s ideology theory, drawing on Butler: “the key problem of Althusser’s ideology theory: its imperative to distinguish decisively between discourse and experience, between language and reality, between word and thing” (752).
He also points out some of what I might call the paternalistic notions of critical theory: “if you know what’s really going on, you are in a position to fight against it” (746). He goes on:
As Charles Paine notes in The Resistant Writer, this pedagogy of resistance to dominant culture has historical precedent in a particular form of rhetoric instruction. He writes, “From Isocrates to Plato to Burke to contemporary composition theory, rhetorical training has sought to endow students with the wherewithal to resist the powerful discourses of a culture that seeks everywhere to inhabit them.” According to Paine, in its current form this tradition calls upon students to “resist the ‘subject positions’ imposed upon them.” But, he argues, one irony of this resistance pedagogy is that students might see the pedagogy itself as the thing being imposed, the invader to be resisted: “While we may think we have to remember that those cultural beliefs, as far as our students are concerned, are their beliefs, and that our countercultural intrusions are the alien ones.” (747)
Susan Miller and Sánchez both critique the move to “cultural hermeneutics” in Composition as a way to create “professional parity,” but “If it mistakes ideolgoical analysis for rhetorical production, composition helps arm students with new wyas of reading the world. But reading the world is not the same as writing (in) it” (747).
Sánchez moves into faith and belief at one point, which I am not quite sure if I follow. I got a little lost through here, flowing between what seemed like theory to discussion of belief that seemed more theological (which he seems to admit it borders on). I agree that writing shoudl be “effecting meaning” and not “manipulating form” (754), and I think that I agree with Zizek and Sánchez that “ideology works at the level of doing rather than knowing” (755, citing Zizek). This is corroborated by the fact that I can know something is dangerous, sexist, classist, but find myself doing it, and my actions are how ideology is passed on, not my thoughts.
Hmmm… So, then, does it follow, as Sánchez says it does, that “For compositionists, it is to understand that ideology is not found in some supposedly latent content of writing but rather in the act of writing itself” (755)? Sánchez wants to theorize the “surface,” the act of writing, not the epistemics (755).
This makes some sense, especially during the act of writing, the meaning-making created during writing. Sure. What about when a text is created, though, and the way it acts on society, not as an act during writing, but as a piece ineracted with by readers?
Confused, as always… There is a response in the next issue of JAC which I’ll read next…
Sánchez, Raúl. “Composition’s Ideology Apparatus: A Critique.” JAC 21.4 (2001): 741-759.
