Giving Substance to Vision

My very first thought as I considered the materiality of language was that my father used to measure his farts. Not in smell (is there a meter for that?) or in noise, but in length. "Wow!" he'd exclaim. "That one was eighteen feet if it was an inch!" I grew up with the felt sense of a gaseous python winding through our house, following its gleeful handler. My father's language gave weight and substance to what was invisible but there; it forced me to think about transparency in ways that stretched far beyond the immediate context. Using language, I could transform one thing into something else, and to describe this new thing using any other language was to create yet another entirely new animal.

David Bleich (2001) urges us to create a new animal in his essay "The Materiality of Language and the Pedagogy of Exchange." As I reached his concluding "What if?" questions and their consequences for teaching, I said aloud, "Hallelujah! You're singin' to the choir!" There's a good reason why I used language from a religious context, a context I haven't found myself in for over thirty years: what Bleich wants to see happen in composition would take an act of God. As I read and thought, my desire to change fundamental aspects of my discipline and my cynicism as a member of it duked it out.

Bleich argues that the way we learn to use language as children is interactive and collaborative, an exchange in which we offer words to others and they accept, reciprocate, alter, or decline them. Through this exchange we develop a relationship not just with other language users but with the language itself. From such exchanges we learn the explicit and implicit rules of many genres. In contrast to this way of learning and studying language, Bleich (2001: 137-38) argues, in school settings we have "sacralized" written language, and only one genre at that: the academic argument. Because of standard literacy practices such as testing and grading, segregating students by narrow measures of ability, ignoring spoken language except when it is used to indicate "incompetence," and severely limiting the range and variety of texts "studied" through direct instruction from a teacher, we have missed the opportunity to continue to be learners ourselves and "to let all students feel the experience of teaching and to extend the exchanges of teaching to new places."

Bleich moves toward his pedagogy of exchange by insisting on both the materiality of language and the necessity of seeing language as genre. Language has presence; it has "thingness" (my term, not his!); it is palpable; we can feel it and its consequences. It is not transparent, not a simple conduit for meaning that exists elsewhere. Meaning, he points out, drawing on language theorists like Derrida, Bakhtin, and Todorov, can be found only in the situation, in the context of the language as it is used. Language structures social relations--a doctor who calls me "Mrs." instead of "Dr." or addresses me by no name or title at all indicates something about his or her perception of our relationship, and I must accept or challenge or alter that perception by my response or lack of it. Genres, too, though sometimes presented by teachers simply as "writing categories," with a focus on the formal aspects, are also social constructs with enormous importance. Thus Carolyn Miller (1994: 37) posits that "as recurrent patterns of language use, genres help constitute the substance of our cultural life." Bleich relates this notion directly to our classroom, arguing that, rather than teach empty forms, that is, language as a simple container, we must understand that substance, the materiality of language in use, and we must reconceive of the classroom as a "real-life" situation. By emphasizing the materiality of language and by broadening the focus of study from one written genre to many genres of language, we can fundamentally change the social relationship of teacher and student.

Like many first...