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Garahan, Katie.  The Common Core Initiative and Standardized Violence.

This year, in the second year of my M.A., I have become extremely interested in writing center research because at the heart of this research lie the critical questions of our discipline: questions about literacy, diversity, and identity. Writing centers aren’t just theoretical spaces; they are physical places in which tutors, students, and administrators must face the tough questions and practicalities about teaching writing. As a former high school English teacher and a current writing center tutor/ first year writing instructor, I am especially interested in how writing centers act as hubs that connect high school writing and college writing, especially in a time when the gap between the two is a hot topic of conversation. As a researcher and a tutor, I believe it is important for me to look at the big picture of academic writing and literacy and to ask, how have students experienced writing before they came to college?

I realized at the 2014 University of Maryland Conference on Academic and Professional Writing that high school writing was a topic of interest for writing instructors and professors, as well. Presenters seemed particularly interested in the Common Core State Standards (CCSS), which arose out of an educational crisis du jour: students were apparently going to college woefully unprepared. At least five presentations mentioned the CCSS at the conference. The standards are supposed to make students more college and career ready. Presenters and audience members questioned: but do they really? What does it even mean to be college-ready? The CCSS have been an interest of mine for some time. In my last two years teaching in North Carolina, I was learning and implementing these standards as well as preparing for a barrage of new state tests.

After my years of experience using the standards in the classroom, preparing students for the corresponding tests, engaging in discussions with other professionals, researching the standards’ implementation, and critically analyzing the English Language Arts (ELA) 9-10 standards and a corresponding North Carolina state test, I believe the standards not only fail to meet their intended goal, but are actually harmful to students’ diverse identities.

The CCSS were created in 2009 with David Coleman leading and Bill Gates funding the endeavor. A team of 25, 15 of which were representatives from test-making companies and zero of which were current classroom teachers, created the standards and released them after just two months of revisions suggested by educational representatives (Endacott and Goering). The creators of the CCSS argue that creating a national set of uniform standards will eliminate the aforementioned crisis of students’ unpreparedness. The standards were quickly adopted by 45 states plus the District of Columbia with the help from the federal government. Schools, most of which were in a constant fear of budget cuts inevitably resulting in teacher lay-offs, received Race for the Top money in exchange for adopting the CCSS. Essentially, according to Endacott and Goering, “[s]tates faced the forced choice of either adopting the CCSS or losing millions of federal dollars in grants during the worst economic recession in 80 years” (90).

According to the CCSS website, “the mastery of each standard is essential for success in college, career, and life in today’s global economy.” Specifically, the standards are “research and evidence based; clear, understandable, and consistent; [a]ligned with college and career expectations; [b]ased on rigorous content and the application of knowledge through higher-order thinking skills; [b]uilt upon the strengths and lessons of current state standards; [i]nformed by other top-performing countries to prepare all students for success in our global economy and society” (“About the Standards”). These claims are all despite the fact that the standards were created, revised, and implemented without field testing and very little time for revision.

The standards, according to the CCSS website, “represent the next generation of K–12 standards designed to prepare all students for success in college, career, and life by the time they graduate from high school.” Furthermore, they “promote equity by ensuring all students are well prepared to collaborate and compete with their peers in the United States and abroad” (“About the Standards”) The words “all students” are used frequently throughout the description of the standards to enforce the idea that these standards are equitable, value-neutral, and impartial. They claim give every student the same opportunity to succeed in college and in their careers.

The two major figureheads for the CCSS, Bill Gates and David Coleman, present the standards as if they are panacea to the aforementioned educational crisis. In his speech at the 2014 Teaching and Learning Conference, Bill Gates asserted that the standards “give teachers the freedom [they] need to be creative, the tools [they] need to be effective, [and] the feedback [they] need to keep improving—and the rigor that our students need to become great learners.” Positioning himself as the purveyor of educational knowledge, regardless of the fact that his audience members are actual classroom teachers, Gates contends that the CCSS provide teachers with educational necessities that they previously lacked. With these tools in hand, according to Gates, teachers can finally be effective, creative, and ever-improving. Most importantly, Gates asserts, the CCSS enable teachers to provide a rigorous learning environment in which all students can thrive. In his 2011 speech “Bringing the Common Core to Life,” Coleman also positions himself as an educational authority as he stands in front of a group of teachers and delivers an example ELA lesson, even though he himself, like Gates, has never actually taught in the classroom.

Despite their quick acceptance, the standards were met with opposition. Common critiques of the standards include lack of research and testing, absence of teacher contribution in their creation, the involvement of corporations and corporate ideals, and the assertion that the CCSS serve to reify the same ideals of previous standards. While well-founded, these critiques do not seem to get at the heart of the issue. While the creators and espousers of the standards claim these standards are impartial, objective, and value-neutral; they actually promote a one-size-fits-all set of literacy skills. These literacy skills do not, however, support actual, contextualized, linguistically-diverse literacy education. Thus, the standards and their corresponding tests are actually harmful to student’s ability to learn and develop to their full academic potential. Using Johan Galtung’s notion of violence, which claims “violence is present when human beings are being influenced so that their actual somatic and mental realizations are below their potential realizations” (168), we can see that the CCSS and the corresponding tests enact violence on students. In what follows, I will specifically explore the violence of the Grade 9-10 English Language Arts (ELA) Language Standards as well as the grade 9-10 2012-2013 released North Carolina state test.

Galtung further contends that “[s]tructural violence is silent, it does not show […] and may be seen as about as natural as the air around us” (173). This structural violence is the product of a notion upheld by the CCSS that universalized literacy standards, marked by Standard English, are impartial and unbiased. According to the CCSS website, “[t]he standards […] lay out a vision of what it means to be a literate person who is prepared for success in the 21^st century.” Because these standards purport to be impartial, they construct what it means to be a literate person, and the subsequent standardized tests—which are also supposed to be impartial—are tools that measure that particular literacy.

According to Iris Marion Young, however, “the ideal of impartiality serves ideological functions. It masks the ways in which the particular perspectives of dominant groups claim universality” (97). Young’s conception of impartiality can be applied to the CCSS, which assume that standard written English is impartial, objective, and value-neutral. The CCSS grade 9-10 language and literacy standards conflate language and Standard English, requiring students to “demonstrate command of the conventions of standard English” grammatically, mechanically, and stylistically. These language standards assume that there is one correct way of understanding and using language and students must learn this specific, correct way in order to be literate. For example, students should “determine or clarify” precise meanings of words, “spell correctly,” and “identify and correctly use patterns of word changes” (“English Language Arts”). There is little room for play and imagination in these standards. For example, students should learn to “use a semicolon (and perhaps a conjunctive adverb) to link two or more closely related independent clauses” (“English Language Arts”). Here, punctuation is presented as static and devoid of nuance. The standard does not prompt students to discover why a writer would use a semicolon instead of a different punctuation or how a semicolon impacts the flow of a piece of writing. Thus, students begin to understand language as decontextualized and rule-bound. There is a set of static rules they must learn or they cannot write, and they are bad at English.

These language standards leave no room for the linguistic diversity of students from varying socioeconomic, cultural, and translingual backgrounds. In her book, The Violence of Literacy, Elspeth Stuckey contends that literacy research and education “begin in the ideas of the socially and economically dominant class and […] take the forms of socially acceptable subjects, stylistically permissible forms […]. Becoming literate signifies in large part the ability to conform or, at least, to appear conformist” (19). Language is perhaps the most prominent marker of race, class, and gender and embedded in these ostensibly impartial standards and standardized tests are assumptions about race, class, and gender. According to Diane Ravitch, “[i]n New York state, which gave the Common Core tests last spring, only 30% of students across the state passed, […] 3% of English language learners passed, […] 5% of students with disabilities passed and [f]ewer than 20% of African American and Hispanic students passed” (qtd. in Strauss). Thus, students who do not grow up immersed in the dominant linguistic code, Standard English, are at a clear disadvantage. Faced with the necessity to conform or fail, these students’ “actual somatic and mental realizations are below their potential realizations” (Galtung).

Therefore, espousing these standards and tests is doing what James Paul Gee said in his presentation at the University of Maryland Writing Conference—forcing students to play a game without teaching them how, without giving them appropriate tools, and without even telling them that there is a game to play. In this case, this game is essentially an accepted system of literacy which is marked by Standard English. Stuckey echoes Gee’s notion, saying that “standardized (literacy) tests are not natural disasters. They are a system” (126). As such, the CCSS present Standard English as the only correct way to be literate and the only way to success in college and a career. Stuckey asserts that “[s]tudents of nonstandard languages in the United States do not fail because of a language failure; they fail because they live in a society that lies about language” (122). The lie, here, is that literacy standards are impartial, objective, and value-neutral. In his previously mentioned speech, Coleman acknowledges that the literacy standards espouse the “language of power.” He does not, however, concede that they also espouse the language of the powerful, the group—namely the creators and funders of the CCSS—who decide exactly what it means to be literate and, thus, who is allowed to be considered literate.

Young’s argument can also be applied to standardized tests, which force students to demonstrate mastery over the aforementioned literacy standards. In his presentation at the UMD writing conference, Suresh Conagarajah maintained that the CCSS and their tests can be read and interpreted differently by non-native English speakers. Specifically, the standards seem to recognize Standard English as a fact, when it is actually an ideology. The standards give power to certain students and take it away from others. Thus, it is exemplary of structural violence, which Galtung contends “is silent, it does not show” (173). So, students who grow up submerged in the dominant linguistic code enter the classroom “prepared,” while the rest of the students are not. These students are marked as lacking necessary skills to survive in a competitive educational atmosphere, and they must be fixed, i.e. their difference, as Young says, must be “denied or repressed” (98).

For example, one question on the test reads: “What is the effect of the metaphors in the sentences below […] ‘Not all field geologists, however, refer to the Big Bend as a paradise. For some, this land of twisted, tortured rock is a nightmare’” (“North Carolina READY” 7). Yes, this figure of speech fits the definition of a metaphor all students memorize: it is a comparison not using like or as. However, these particular metaphors, paradise and nightmare, are used so often within the US cultural vernacular, they have become idiomatic. A native English speaker does not have to understand the metaphor to grasp the meaning of the figure of speech, and, thus, would have little trouble choosing the correct answer, “They emphasize the allure and repulsiveness of the landscape” (“North Carolina READY” 7). A non-native speaker is, however, at a disadvantage, potentially not knowing the idiomatic meaning of the words nightmare and paradise. Thus, they might choose the more direct answer: “They compare Big Bend to a contradictory dream world” (“North Carolina READY” 7). Even for native speakers, the distinction between these two answers is arbitrary at best.

Stuckey also sees violence in the “materiality of literacy,” which “is its hardware.” In the case of the CCSS, the materiality of literacy includes the state tests, which “suggest language divorced from content and from social and economic realities” (86). Thus, standardized tests represent decontextualized literacy. They are administered in a contrived setting where students and teachers are overwhelmed by the gravity of the task at hand. The tests determine the students’ grades and in some cases whether or not they pass at all. The timed tests are administered digitally, so, of course, students with less experience typing and reading online and/ or students who do not have computers in their homes, will be at a disadvantage. Can meaningful reading, writing, and learning actually happen in this scenario?

Stuckey contends that “to reduce text, the stuff of literacy, to mere stuff is not only insouciant but dangerous” (87). Similarly, Botzakis et al. assert that “[i]gnoring social, economic, and cultural aspects of literacy,” i.e. decontextualizing language and literacy, will “result in maintaining a system of ‘haves’ and ‘have nots’ in our schools, and the move to a ‘common core’ will become just another seemingly groundbreaking policy that in actuality maintains the status quo” (223). According to Botzakis et al., this decontextualized literacy education does not promote student literacy development by “allowing them choice and voice in classroom activities, and helping them find relevance by connecting reading practices with the knowledge, experiences, and identities they bring to school” (228). Literacy is contextual, and treating it otherwise prevents students from realizing their full academic potential.

In the NC 2012-2013 common core state test, students are given little to no context about the selected passages and then are expected to choose correct answers to multiple choice questions. An excerpt from “The Castaway” by Rabindranath Tagore particularly sticks out to me. The passage is laden with interesting cultural notions about familial relationships, gender, and community, which are probably quite different than the majority of the students in the classroom. For example, the passage reads: “Kiran was a universal favorite with her family and neighbors, so that, when she fell seriously ill, they were all anxious. The village wiseacres thought it shameless for her husband to make so much fuss about a mere wife and even to suggest a change of air” (“North Carolina READY” 14). However, students are not given any context about the piece. Where is the author from? Where does the story take place? What is the time period? Despite this lack of context, the students must answer definitive questions, such as: “How do Sharat’s feelings about Nilkanta help develop the theme of the selection” and “What is the meaning of the simile in the sentence below from paragraph 5” (“North Carolina READY” 17). Furthermore, the questions are what Stuckey calls “vacuous, discrete, and random,” not to mention sometimes confusing. One question reads, “In the sentence below from the last paragraph, how does the connotation of the words reflect Sharat’s attitude toward the boy. ‘Moreover, he had got hold of a mongrel village dog which he petted so recklessly that it came indoors with muddy paws, and left tokens of its visit on Sharat’s spotless bed’” (“North Carolina READY” 18). There is a lot happening in this question. To fully answer, one would have to first determine the underlying connotation of the words as well as Sharat’s attitude toward the boy, and then explain how the connotation of the words reflects this attitude. The correct answer reads, “He is annoyed by the boy’s disregard for cleanliness” (“North Carolina READY” 18). This answer only addresses Sharat’s attitude and makes no reference to connotation at all. It is essentially a basic comprehension question.

This is just one example of the many “vacuous, discrete, random” and confusing questions from the test. In particular, questions which measure the previously described language standards always assume that there is a correct way to read the given texts. Thus, students must find the effect of the metaphors, the meaning of words and phrases, or the purpose of figurative language. Again, there is no room for imagination, choice, voice, or identity. Even questions where students have to write their answer are vacuous and confusing. One question reads: “How does the author use language to advance her point of view. Use evidence from the selection to support your answer” (“North Carolina READY” 24). The term point of view has two meanings. One is the literary point of view of a story, such as first and third person. The other is a person’s stance or perspective. We may clearly recognize that this question uses the latter definition. However, when this term appears on a standardized test, it almost always refers to the literary definition. This presents a stressful situation for students in a high-pressure testing situation. They have to quickly identify the term, decide on its contextual meaning, and write a response. It seems that these decontextualized literacy tools measure a student’s ability to decode and understand test questions more so than their ability to successfully utilize language within a variety of contexts. These passages and test questions reveal just how removed “the hierarchal decision making structures” actually are from classroom instruction and student learning (Young 97). This is not surprising, however, considering that the majority of them have absolutely no experience with classroom teaching. Thus, these decontextualized literacy assessment tools hinder valid learning.

The existence of standards in any educational institution—be it K-12, college, or even writing centers—is a reality. As Ravitch said, “It is good to have standards. I believe in standards” (qtd. in Strauss). However, accepting a set of standards as a value-neutral, objective panacea to a perceived educational crisis is more than problematic; it’s injurious to students’ academic, personal and linguistic identities. Stuckey contends that “an unwillingness to either relinquish or expand notions of literacy is riveted in American economic and educational structures” (33). The CCSS and their corresponding tests represent the status quo within literacy education: they tout Standard English as an unbiased norm, and they construct an exclusionary notion of what it means to be literate. As a writing center researcher and tutor, I believe it is important for me to understand the common core movement in order to understand student writers’ pre-college writing histories as well as to explore the underlying assumptions I—as well as the institution in which I work—hold about literacy.

 

Works Cited

“About the Standards.” Common Core State Standards Initiative. 2014. Web. 1 Nov 2014.

“English Language Arts Standards Language Grade 9-10.” Common Core State Standards Initiative. 2014. Web. 20 Sep 2014.

“North Carolina READY End-of-Course Assessment English II.” Public Schools of North Carolina. State Board of Education/ Department of Public Instruction. 2012. Web. 20 Sep 2014.

Botzakis, Stergios, Leslie David Burns, and Leigh A. Hall. “Literacy Reform and Common Core State Standards: Recycling the Autonomous Model.” Language Arts. 91.4 (2014). 223-235. JStor. Web. 10 Oct 2014.

Coleman, David. “Bringing the Common Core to Life.” NYSED.gov. New York State Education. 2011. Web. 20 Nov 2014.

Conagarajah, Suresh. “Beyond Native and Nonnative: Negotiating Language in Writing Pedagogy.” University of Maryland. College Park Marriott Hotel & Conference Center, College Park, MD. 11 Oct 2014. Conference Presentation.

Endacott, Jason L. and Christian Z. Goering. “Speaking Truth to Power Reclaiming the Conversation on Education.” English Journal. 103.5 (2014). 89-92. JStor. Web. 10 Oct 2014.

Galtung, Johan. “Violence, Peace, and Peace Research.” Journal of Peace Research 6.3 (1969): 167-191.

Gates, Bill. “Teaching and Learning Conference 2014.” Press Room. Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. 2014. Web. 10 Sep 2014.

Gee, James Paul. “Identity, Discourse, and Paradox in Learning to Write.” University of Maryland. College Park Marriott Hotel & Conference Center, College Park, MD. 10 Oct 2014. Conference Presentation.

Strauss, Valerie. “Everything you Need to Know about the Common Core—Ravitch” The Washington Post. 2014. Web. 20 Nov 2014.

Stuckey, Elspeth. The Violence of Literacy. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/ Cook, 1991.

Young, Iris Marion. Justice and the Politics of Difference. Princeton: Princeton University, 1990. Print.

Howe, Elizabeth.   “Violence and U.S. Military Communications”

Introduction

For the purpose of this paper, violence is defined as any action, direct or indirect, that inhibits an individual from reaching his or her full potential. This definition stems from Johan Galtung’s definition of violence, given in his article “Violence, Peace, and Peace Research.”

…Violence is present when human beings are being influenced so that their actual somatic and mental realizations are below their potential realizations […] Violence is here defined as the cause of the difference between the potential and the actual, between what could have been and what is. (Galtung 168)

The United States military communicates using rhetoric designed and developed over time for specific purposes, many of which are of a violent nature, therefore necessitating rhetoric to the same degree of violence. While so many forms of violence in the military are obviously apparent in the physical actions and demonstrations of force sanctioned, many more lie in the rhetoric of the military culture.

In the preface to his book Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument with Historical Illustrations, Michael Walzer explains what he believes is the unfortunate necessity of this rhetoric and the consequent attitude those who use it must maintain. “We would be better off if we did not need a vocabulary like that, but given we need it, we must be grateful that we have it” (Walzer xi). Communication of war strategies, combative actions, and individual moments of extreme courage not only allow for functionality during the conflict, but also ensure that these aspects of military history are eternalized years after cease-fire.

“Without this vocabulary, we could not have thought about the Vietnam war as we did, let alone have communicated our thoughts to other people,” Walzer continues (Walzer xi). The question, then, relates to the way in which those who wish to communicate use this vocabulary and to whom the communication is addressed. How is military rhetoric manipulated in one way or another in an attempt to alter the level of severity of any violent connotations?

Using the same definition of violence mentioned previously, violence in military rhetoric emerges as two distinct, redundant forms depending on which of two different categories of vocabulary is chosen or, just as frequently, excluded. Through studying both historical and modern military vocabulary, these two different categories can be designated as euphemistic and perspicuous. Communicators frequently use euphemisms as replacements for what is arguably the harsher, perspicuous rhetoric to convey messages to those not directly affected by the physical violence of military culture.

For example, the warhead of a Titan II missile, an explosive with roughly 630 times the explosive power of the atomic bomb that destroyed Hiroshima, was described by an Air Force colonel as a “very large potentially disruptive re-entry system” (Bruce 295). Edward Palm, in his review of Paul Fussell’s book Doing Battle: The Making of a Skeptic, pointed out the military definition of bombing defenseless villages from the air, driving inhabitants into the countryside, and setting huts on fire with incendiary bullets as “pacification” (Palm 71). During the Vietnam war, President Johnson spoke of “our American boys” instead of “soldiers” to distract the public’s attention from the negative impacts of war (Fuiorea 216).

The application of these two different rhetorical categories leads to the two different forms of violence against those to whom the military culture must be communicated.

The introduction of harsh, perspicuous language into non-military environments perpetuates violence at a level of society that would otherwise be shielded from it. On the other hand, the use of euphemisms to replace vocabulary that would paint more accurate depictions of military operations in an attempt to deceive the public demonstrates a completely different form of violence. This rhetorical strategy inhibits addressees from forming complete conceptualizations of the military by concealing vital information. In 1917, Senator Hiram Johnson warned the public, “truth is always the first casualty of war” (Palm 73).

Which of these two forms of violence is the more severe: the truth or lack thereof? This paper aims not to answer this question but rather present points of view and opinions that demonstrate the perceived level of severity of each.

Building the Beloved Community

“Our language is full of militaristic words with benign intentions” (Morin and Mouliert 23). These benign intentions are often not reflected in the actual effect of these words in communicated discourse. The “Building the Beloved Community” Issue Committee published an article titled with the question, “Can language be violent?” The term “Beloved Community” was first coined in the early days of the 20^th century by Josiah Royce, the founder of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, then popularized by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. The Beloved Community represents a community comprised of individuals “committed to and trained in the philosophy and methods of nonviolence;” an “achievable goal” if pursued by the critical number of people necessary (Morin and Mouliert 23).

“Nonviolence,” in this context, encompasses not only a lack of physical force but also thought, word, and deed. The Building the Beloved Community Issue Committee stressed the importance of cleansing everyday language of the benignly intended militaristic words in order to take a small step in the direction of an existence void of violence.

For example, the committee encourages the use of “points” to replace “bullets” and “addresses” to refer to “fights” or “battles.” “Taking the lead” would be a preferable phrase to “spearheading” and “focus” instead of “target.” Instead of explaining that an individual is “struggling for,” “standing up for,” “standing against,” or “fighting for” a certain cause, explain that he or she “devotes his/her life to” this cause (Morin and Mouliert 23). These vocabulary substitutions contribute a small part in putting a stop to the perpetuation of violence in everyday communication.

These substitutions require persistent commitment to the cause of nonviolence due to the fact that people are unconsciously attracted to violent terms, especially in cases of metaphors, often used to make a salient point (Summy 573). Ralph Summy, in his peace on nonviolent speech in the “Peace Review” theorized reasons why people are unconsciously attracted to violent terms. He also examined and hypothesized how this attraction helps to perpetuate a culture of violence, which affects societal behavior.

One of these reasons is the desire to “express ourselves in the most dynamic and forceful manner possible.” This want to express force is underlined by the aspect of our subconscious concerned with power. “People at all levels of social and political interaction tend to cling to the outmoded view that it is not cooperation but superiority of physical force and how it is directed that constitute the decisive and rewarding factors in conflict” (Summy 573). Even those advocating nonviolence often recognize that it must occasionally be employed in the interest of a cause and, therefore, must be “held in reserve” somewhere in the subconscious.

Humans are believed to be innately violent, leading to the tendency to employ more violent vocabulary. “Beneath the veneer of civil and ordered human relations, Homo sapiens is an innately violent creature, and society is constantly on the threshold of chaos” (Summy 573). Violent language acts as a catalyst in this regard in that personal expression directs and reflects concrete phenomenon such as societal behavior.

Summy, like Building the Beloved Community Issue, offered substitutions to replace more violent terms in an attempt to lessen the everyday violence discretely incorporated into society through language. “Shooting holes in an argument” could instead be conveyed as “unraveling a ball of yarn.” A soccer “shoot-out” could be more appropriately referred to as a “boot-out.” “To kill two birds with one stone” may instead be “to stroke two birds with one hand” while a “double-edged sword” is a “two-sided coin.” Individuals should not aspire to “dress to kill” but rather “dress to thrill” (Summy 573).

Euphemistic Metaphors in Military Usage

The use of these metaphors, however, does more than extract a certain degree of violence from daily discourse. Applied specifically to military culture, euphemistic metaphors allow more vivid, relatable, understandable images to be conveyed to those who want to understand what they will never directly experience. American literature contains an abundance of timeless pieces written during and as a result of various military conflicts woven into our history. Wartime leaves deep scars behind, but also produces some of the most emotionally provocative vocabulary.

This same use of metaphors both reestablishes the public’s support of the government as well as a soldier’s confidence in himself. The Khe Sanh garrison, an early 1968 garrison of 6,000 United States and South Vietnamese troops, found itself surrounded by an estimated 15,000 to 20,000 North Vietnamese troops. The operation to extract these soldiers was referred to as Operation Niagara, a metaphor intended to invoke an image of “cascading shells and bombs” against the enemy (Dochinoiu 71).

Similarly, the naming of the operations against Iraqi aggression was as strategic as the actual operations. “Desert Shield” conveys a defensive message, emphasizing that Iraqi forces were already deployed. The United States efforts were merely a force of deterrence against the aggression already displayed. “Desert Storm” uses the storm metaphor to shift the focus from deterrence to offensive operations. General H. Norman Schwarzkopf told American soldiers, “You must be the thunder and lightning of Desert Storm” (Dochinoiu 72).

These same metaphors effectively garner the support of the public for the government, which is vital for efficient government operations. In many situations, the harsh, perspicuous vocabulary would evoke unrest and even panic within the public and society as a whole.

Ty Soloman examined the rhetoric used by President George W. Bush during the aftermath of the events of September 11, 2001, looking specifically for metaphors and imagery possibly used to pacify a frightened public. The study included all presidential weekly radio addresses from September 11, 2001 until August 7, 2004, televised public statements made by the president on September 11, 2001, and the first three State of the Union addresses after September 11, 2001 (Soloman 1).

Bush’s rhetoric in the years following the events of 9/11 employs metaphors and key words, most likely in an attempt to garner support from the nation as well as hopefully alleviate some of the fear that gripped the nation at this point in American history.

In addition to various religious references, Bush used a series of metaphors that invoked images of darkness, shadow, and evil. Bush described the anti-terrorism operations sanctioned as a result of 9/11 as a move to “eradicate the evil of terrorism” (Soloman 6). Bush’s rhetoric dehumanizes terrorists by referring to the operations as an eradication of the evil of terrorism rather than the terrorists. This dehumanization of terrorists would draw the public’s support for the operations. Not until years later, in 2003 when the immediate panic the attacks evoked in the nation had subsided, does Bush abandon this dehumanizing metaphor for the more blunt, aggressive rhetoric. He refers to the continued anti-terrorism efforts as “a struggle between terrorist killers and peaceful nations” and the terrorists as a “hidden network of killers” (Soloman 6).

The metaphors Bush used in the years following the events of 9/11 were crucial in ensuring the public remained supportive of the anti-terrorism efforts deployed during the aftermath. Rhetorical power, in this situation, was more than a form of communication but also “a way of constituting the people to whom it is addressed by furnishing them with the very equipment they need to assess its use” (Soloman 15).

Inherited Language of Concealment

We use words given to us by past generations. Walzer wrote on the nature of the language handed down from generation to generation:

Our anger and indignation were shaped by the words available to express them, and the words were at the tips of our tongues even though we had never before explored their meanings and connections. When we talked about aggression and neutrality, the rights of prisoners of war and civilians, atrocities and war crimes, we were drawing upon the work of many generations of men and women, most of whom we had never heard of. (Walzer xi)

Although war is not an emotion, the language used to discuss the emotions evoked by war is rivaled arguably only by that used to speak of love; the two most intense emotions expressed verbally. This type of language is “rich with moral meaning” and developed over years of discourse and conflict (Walzer 3). When it comes to the function of these morally and emotionally charged words within the military culture, “harsh words are the immediate sanctions of the war convention, sometimes accompanied or followed by military attacks…” (Walzer 44). While neither the words nor the actions carry the same level of absolutism separate from the other, combined they sanction military action.

The euphemisms used by those who act as the communicators between the military realm and the non-military realm aim to relate those who will never directly experience the physical violence to those on the frontlines. These euphemisms are carefully used to maintain public support for military operations as well as inform without enraging the non-military population of the nation. Metaphors, euphemisms, and specific rhetoric remove unnecessary violent language from realms not subject to the direct effects of physical violence.

Conversely, have the government’s efforts to maintain public support resulted in the concealment of vital information, inhibiting the public’s ability to fully understand the actions of the military?

Edward Palm, in his review of Paul Fussell’s Doing Battle: The Making of a Skeptic referenced one of Fussell’s earlier pieces from 1975: Great War and Modern Memory. Palm described the earlier piece as a “definitive account of the ways in which WWI bifurcated the modern psyche, establishing an absurd ‘no man’s land’ between personal and official accounts of the war” (Palm 72).

“At some point in our military history, cant became our mandatory mode of expression, particularly at the highest levels of command” (Palm 72). Palm defines cant as insincere, inflated, vague language aimed at putting a good face on not so good actions. The trend, according to Palm, can be traced back to early years of the 20^th century when George Orwell, author of 1984 brushed upon the developing rhetorical pattern in his essay, “Politics and the English Language.” Politicians use language for much more than just communication, but rather concealment. “…Political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible…political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging, and sheer cloudy vagueness” (Palm 73).

Palm demonstrated this evolution of military language by comparing the modern politics of the military to the part, or lack thereof, politics played years previously.

If Pickett had made his disastrous charge in today’s political climate…General Lee could never have assumed responsibility for the awful outcome with such simple eloquence as to insist that “It is all my fault.” He would have been expected to magnify individual acts of heroism until the public lost sight of the charge’s essential futility and the wholesale slaughter seemed redeemed and even worthwhile. (Palm 71)

Euphemisms are used for “everything belligerent, introduced into language skillfully, and deliberately so” (Galtung 2). Euphemisms use pleasing vocabulary and semantics to mask the unpleasant nature of whatever concept they replace. The Strategic Defense Initiative is an example of specifically chosen semantics to convey an inarguably positive message. Strategic thinking and functioning characterizes all efficiently operated militaries. Defense “connotes peace” and a restraint of provocative force maintained but initiative must still be taken (Galtung 2). The name of the Strategic Defense Initiative is so named using specific words designed to convey the supposedly nonviolent intentions of a military conglomerate.

The same way euphemisms shield the public from unnecessary violence, they can also conceal necessary violence; the violence the public must be exposed to in order to remain informed of the actual actions of the military and make informed decisions regarding what to support. “Words and phrases euphemistically used by American…mass media to refer to military operations not only sugar-coat harsh events, but also premeditatedly modify the addressee’s correct perception of reality, so that what actually happens is no longer reflected in language” (Fuiorea 212).

Violations of the Cooperative Principle

The Cooperative Principle elaborates on common assumptions shared by people in order to communicate and comprehend. These assumptions declare the maxims of cooperative communication to be relevance, saying no more and no less than is needed at the time, and not saying what is false. Military euphemisms can be interpreted in such a way that all three of these maxims are violated (Fuiorea 212).

Certain military euphemistic words and phrases violate the Cooperative Principle by presenting information in a way not easily understandable by others, most likely with the intent to mislead, thus violating the falsehood maxim. A “permissive environment” is one of unchallenging territory from the military point of view. “Administrative detention” is imprisonment without charge or trial and a “generous offer” is a demand for surrender. These phrases conceal true connotations by using nonviolent words such as permissive, administrative, and generous (Fuiorea 213).

Other euphemisms contain too little information for the true message to ever be fully understood, possibly with the same intent to deceive. Official military rhetoric presented to the public very rarely contains vocabulary such as guilt, murder, assassination, torture, mistake, in an attempt to minimize undesirable awareness on the part of the public. In this sense, language becomes a propaganda tool used to hide a provocative reality (Fuiorea 213).

Another maxim of the Cooperative Principle states that what speakers say should be true and does not lack adequate evidence. Certain euphemisms purposely replace words that would reveal a harsh reality. For example, in April 2005, the US Military made the statement that, “If we don’t take the initiative, others will take the initiative before us.” In this statement, “taking the initiative” acts as a euphemism for our military being the first to launch offensive operations against the opposing force (Fuiorea 213).

Institutional Deception

The media plays a significant part in the deception maintained through military euphemisms. News broadcasts are careful to describe enemies as “soft targets,” not humans. Bombs are dropped by aircrafts, not the human pilots within them. If the wrong building is destroyed by weaponry, it was faulty equipment (Fuiorea 214). The use of these phrases rather than the arguably more accurate ones deflects responsibility of some of the more horrendous acts of war and violence committed by the military.

In official press releases, the Pentagon stopped all use of the word “kill” or the phrase “number killed,” and instead referred to these as “casualties,” again deflecting responsibility by concealing any sense of choice on the part of those who committed the act.

In Harry Bruce’s piece, “Language of the U.S. Military,” he pointed out many more translations of common, nonmilitary rhetoric into “Pentagonese.” The U.S. Armed Forces Journal jokingly enumerated several “Pentagonese” terms: surprise attack as “premature offense,” death as “circadian deregulation,” tank as “hostility platform,” peace as “permanent pre-hostility,” and battle as “violence processing” (Bruce 295).

According to Bruce’s piece, the Quarterly Review of Doublespeak took the “joke” one step further by reporting that General Bernard Rogers, the Supreme Allied Commander in Europe made a statement that described civilian casualties as “collateral damage.” This statement, however, was no joke, but an accurately quoted example of doublespeak (Bruce 295). This example supports Fuiorea’s statement in her article on pragmatism in military language: “Military euphemisms are used to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable…” (Fuiorea 216).

While the majority of Bruce’s piece humorously pokes fun at the euphemistic military language, employed in the Pentagon more than in most other military environments due to the high concentration of military presence, he also touches upon the more serious aspect of doublespeak. When military personnel speak the truth, it is undeniably disconcerting, made only more so by the fact that it does not occur often. “It’s when military get mournful that they sound the most like creatures from another planet, or from a computer’s icy womb” (Bruce 296).

That being said, Bruce’s piece expresses an opinion he considers to be the consensus of a significant portion of the public population that, “I’d feel a lot better about the future of the real world if military officers had a commitment to talking like the real people everywhere, who pray they’ll not end their lives as collateral damage” (Bruce 296).

There is another inhibiting aspect of these euphemisms which is not as apparent as the deception maintained in order to not evoke fear or anger. Some of these euphemisms have the effect of minimizing the efforts of service men and women, suppressing any emotions of admiration or even recognition that would result if these euphemisms did not dull the harshness of military actions.

“Only a few have understood, much less been sympathetic to, how the unrelenting political pressure to keep old illusions alive has victimized the military as well, ultimately demeaning those who serve and even denigrating their legitimate sacrifices,” (Palm 74).

The violence committed against the public overshadows that done unto those men and women on the frontlines, whose sacrifices go unrecognized and hidden beneath appeasing euphemisms. Even further beyond that lies the violence committed against those memorialized in history as “collateral damage,” a “civilian casualty,” or “caught in the cross-fire.”

Those who fall victim to military violence become a number in a system of categorization based on volume of deaths. “How much killing is ‘systematic killing’? What number of murders makes a ‘massacre’? How many people have to be forced to leave before we can talk of ‘ethnic cleansing’?” (Walzer). These types of words and labels rarely make it to the public before being replaced with euphemisms. These euphemisms bury the harsh reality that is military combat and war, in an interest to maintain an appeased, ignorant public opinion.

Conclusion  

Communication is indispensible in civilized societies regardless of the nature of the concepts being communicated: perspicuously violent or euphemistically nonviolent. However, the art of communication allows for such a high degree of manipulation, the true severity of the violence can be concealed from the public or, conversely, can be imposed upon individuals not in the realm of military culture.

“They are descriptive terms, and without them we would have no coherent way of talking about war. Here are soldiers moving away from the scene of battle, marching over the same ground they marched over yesterday, but fewer now, less eager, many without weapons, many wounded: we call this a retreat” (Walzer 14).

Violent language has the potential to subconsciously perpetuate violence through an innately aggressive species consumed by the concept that force equates to power. Benignly violent terms can be easily substituted with words of a less harsh nature to take a step in the direction of a purely nonviolent existence.

However, military euphemisms have developed to a point of concealing information vital for those not on the front lines to truly comprehend the actions of the military as well as the reasoning behind such actions. The politics of what the public should and should not know has led to a level of distrust among those depending on communicators to accurately depict wartime efforts.

The question remains as to whether or not there is an ideal pattern of rhetoric that could convey enough, but no more than the necessary information required to truly understand military culture, therefore respecting the maxims of the Cooperative Principle. This ideal rhetorical strategy would accurately inform the public of vital military movements without inciting unnecessary distress among the nation’s non-military entity. Incorporating this carefully conceptualized set of rhetoric into everyday use would allow for a better-informed public and a more widely supported military.

 

Works Cited

Bruce, Harry. “Language Of The U.S. Military.” ETC: A Review Of General Semantics 44.3 (1987): 295-296. Education Research Complete. Web. 25 Nov. 2014.

Fuiorea, Elena Dochinoiu. “Stylistic Aspects In The English Military Language.” Land Forces Academy Review 14.2 (2009): 71-8. ProQuest. Web. 25 Nov. 2014.

Fuiorea, Elena. “Pragmatic Aspects In The English Military Language.” Land Forces Academy Review 15.2 (2010): 212-20. ProQuest. Web. 25 Nov. 2014.

Galtung, Johan. “Language and War: Is There a Connection.” Current Research on Peace and Violence 10.1 (1987): 2-6

Galtung, Johan.  “Violence, Peace, and Peace Research.”  Journal of Peace Research 6.3 (1969): 167-191.

Morin, Chris, and Sha’an Mouliert. “Can Language be Violent?” Peace and Freedom 72.1 (2012): 23. ProQuest. Web. 29 Nov. 2014.

Palm, Edward F. “Politics, Military Language, and Paul Fussell.” Marine Corps Gazette 81.2 (1997): 71-4. ProQuest. Web. 25 Nov. 2014.

Soloman, Ty. Religion, “Evil,” and “Freedom”: George W. Bush’s Language Comprising the War on Terror. (2005): 1-18 Southern Illinois University. PDF.

Summy, Ralph. “Nonviolent Speech.” Peace Review 10.4 (1998): 573. Academic Search Complete. Web. 25 Nov. 2014.

Walzer, Michael. Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument with Historical Illustrations. New York: Basic. (1977): xi-44 Print.

 

 

 

Tran, Sieu.  “Violence in Clinical Environments.”

Download .pdf of PowerPoint Presentation

Clinical environments, such as doctor’s offices, hospitals, and emergency rooms, are places where patients come to seek medical assistance. They are meant to be places where patients rest and recover from their physical and mental illnesses. People come to these locations to receive care and love. However, research suggests that violence in clinical environments has increased radically in recent years. There are two types of clinical violence: macroagression, large-scale and obvious acts of violence, and microagression, smaller and less obvious acts of violence. The violence in clinical settings includes acts directed from doctors to patients and acts from patients toward medical staff and students. There is a also a structural level of violence created by the hospital system itself. Violence contributes significantly to the decline in quality of health care for all involved. This phenomenon poses immense problems to health care systems, but approaches to reduce the violence in clincial settings seem slow to develop.

 

Heilker, Paul.  “Coming to Nonviolence.”  JAEPL: Journal of the Assembly for Expanded Perspectives on Learning 20.1 (February 2015). Forthcoming.

Today marks my 769th daily offering of Buddhist wisdom on my blog. To be more precise, every day, for the last 769 days, I have posted a quotation from the American Buddhist nun, Pema Chödrön, on a Tumblr account that links to my Facebook page. Here’s today’s —

13 September 2014

The awakened life isn’t somewhere else — in some distant place that’s accessible only when we’ve got it all together. With the commitment to embrace the world just as it is, we begin to see that sanity and goodness are always present and can be uncovered right here, right now. –Pema Chödrön (Living Beautifully with Uncertainty and Change, 116)

Chödrön is the author of a number of popular books, including The Places that Scare You: A Guide to Fearlessness in Difficult Times and Taking the Leap: Freeing Ourselves from Old Habits and Fears. I stumbled upon her work in what I describe to friends as a “crystal unicorn bookstore” in Olympia, Washington, when I was in town for my niece’s wedding. An incredible discovery, I have been sharing her wisdom with people ever since. Her words help me, and it certainly helps me to share them with others as well. My blog is a tiny karma engine: my daily posts allow me to begin each day by freely offering a gift of unalloyed good to the universe and to my fellow travelers on the planet. Another way to look at it, as folks in 12-Step programs say, is that “You have to give it away to keep it.” In either case, there is no denying that I am personally helped a great deal by sharing Chödrön’s wisdom with others. It is difficult to say, though, how much these posts help others. The numbers would suggest they have little direct influence. The blog has all of 14 followers, and while I have 446 Facebook friends, only about six of them ever “Like” or comment on the Chödrön quotes when they show up in their feeds. But those 20 or so potential daily readers interact with a great many others over the course of their days, so perhaps there are wider concentric circles of influence, especially over a longer haul. I like to think so, anyway.

What I see in these daily posts in miniature, then, is what I seem to have always been about, what I seem to have been doing my entire career as a scholar and teacher of writing — that is, writing spiritually, composing (my) spirituality, writing about spirituality — although I would not have described it as such until, well, this morning, when I sat down and opened up this file. But as I look back and connect the dots, I see it has always been there. And as I look forward, I see that the connection between writing and spirituality has now become the overt focus of my scholarly efforts and what I hope will be my legacy. It is both disconcerting and liberating to say that, at once both an odd realization and a relief.

My awareness of this process begins with my training and work as a graduate teaching assistant during my M.A. program at Colorado State University in the mid-1980s. The broader orientation, mentoring, and instruction I received in writing pedagogy at CSU were tremendously helpful. Every day as I teach, I hear helpful things coming out of my mouth that I can directly attribute to Kate Kiefer, Steve Reid, Jean Wyrick, Bev Atchison, and many other colleagues in that program. But what I am equally grateful for in retrospect, although I would not have said so then, is the extreme narrowness and rigidness of the genres we were allowed to teach our students at that time: the description essay, the comparison/contrast essay, the definition essay, the causal analysis essay, and the like. These assignments not only calcified single modes of development as pure, self-contained textual forms, but more importantly, they valued only logos, dismissing students’ emotional connections to their content as irrelevant and unworthy of discussion, or worse, as a corruption that needed to be excised. It rankled from the get-go. I thought there was something wrong with me. I could not, for the life of me, figure out how I was supposed to write (and how I was supposed to help others write) about anything meaningful, anything worth talking about, without talking about how these matters affected us emotionally. But then again, when I was a new GTA at Colorado State, I was also hurtling toward the end of a decade of drug and alcohol abuse, fueled, I now recognize, by a culture of American masculinity that made it exceedingly difficult to be me — to be, that is, a decidedly emotional dude. My mother’s great gift to me is the ability to weep at the drop of a hat, but it was decidedly not okay — is still decidedly not okay — to be a weepy, emotional male in our culture. My only recourse at the time, the very height of my coping mechanism, was to medicate myself daily with powerful combinations of drugs and alcohol in an attempt to obliterate those troublesome, persistent feelings.

So I am grateful, then, that the hyper-restrictiveness of those required genres and the logos-only nature of academic discourse were so in my face, so utterly offensive and intolerable at the outset of my career, because they made me immediately begin to seek a better, more whole, more humane way of expressing myself and trying to help others express themselves. I needed a form of analytical, scholarly nonfiction that wouldn’t force me to cut myself in two, to forego half of my nature and experience, to excise the affective and emotional from my thinking and writing. I turned first to the exploratory essay. I took to heart Ross Winterowd’s challenge that “if the essay is to serve as the kind of writing through which students realize their full potential as liberally educated beings, they, and we, need an expanded conception of what the essay is and what it can do” (146). I went to Texas Christian University and studied the exploratory essay closely with Gary Tate and Jim Corder for my dissertation. I worked up what I called a rehabilitative theory and pedagogy of the essay as a form of writing that transgresses disciplinary and discursive boundaries in an attempt to recover an undifferentiated unity of life, to address whole problems of human existence.

I was fortunate enough to publish that work as a book for NCTE in 1996 (The Essay: Theory and Pedagogy for an Active Form), but it is difficult even now to assess the influence it may have had on other teachers and scholars. Do we look at the sales figures? The Essay has sold only about 2000 copies over almost two decades, and most of those surely went to university libraries with blanket orders for NCTE titles. Years later, many of those copies may well have gone to the remote storage facilities of those libraries without ever having been checked out. The book is now out of print, although the odd copy still continues to sell, apparently, since I keep getting royalty checks (the two I received in 2014 have been for $2.16 and $2.12, respectively). Do we look at the reviews of the book? As far as I know, only one rather brief review was ever written, which I uncovered as I laboriously constructed the dossier for my tenure case. Do we consider the number of times it has been cited? A search of the Thompson Reuters Arts and Humanities Citation Index database returns zero hits, but a quick Google search on the title suggests that the book has been cited 67 times. Still, since we typically review the literature on our topics to point out the flaws or gaps in our predecessors’ work and thus make room for our own contributions, these 67 citations would more likely than not be working to demonstrate the book’s negative influence, holding it up as an example of “what not to think and what not to do with the essay in writing and writing instruction.” I must content myself, then, with the occasional note that readers have been kind enough to share with me over the years. I’ve printed out those emails, archived them, and pull them out on rainy days to remind myself that my work has been stirring enough to make a few people, at least, reach out across the void and tell me so. Such comments include —

• “The book has been a strong influence on my teaching,”
• “I am writing just let you know how much I’ve appreciated your book on the Essay,”
• “Congratulations on such a thoughtful and helpful book,”
• “Personally and professionally, I think The Essay is a tremendous book,” and
• “Hi! I’m your newest fan. After finishing your book about the essay, I dared myself to contact you.”

Moreover, I take heart knowing that any real, substantive effects the book has had will be manifested in the educational experiences of the students fortunate enough to study with actively engaged scholars and teachers of writing such as these. Over the last 20 years, that could be quite a few students, I suppose, and some of them, too, may have gone on to become writing teachers.

Personally, the strongest effect of my doctoral work on the essay was that I became emboldened enough to use the essay as a vehicle for my own scholarship. I began sending out exploratory essays as manuscripts to the editors of journals and scholarly collections in the field. These editors frequently offered confused but sympathetic responses to the odd artifacts in front of them, and they frequently rejected these explorations outright as “too subjective,” not serious, or not rigorous. But sometimes they warmly embraced my weird, little essays, and even those rare bits of encouragement were enough to help me begin talking freely about the personal and emotional aspects of my professional functioning. I came to foreground the personal and emotional quite candidly in my scholarship as overt issues of consequence in our discipline. As I wrote in one NCTE collection, “I want to discuss this unfortunately and unnecessarily taboo topic and help prepare new teachers for the personal and emotional aspects of their careers, a preparation I did not have and which cost me dearly [. . .] This personal, emotional reality is the single most important thing I have learned as a teacher” (“What I Know Now” 74, 80).

About the same time, I also began taking up the challenge to write directly about spiritual matters in a professional context. I think here of smart, brave editors like Regina Paxton Foehr and Susan A. Schiller, and their collection The Spiritual Side of Writing, which urged me to be brave, too. The chapter I wrote for their book, “The Rhetoric of Spirituality in Popular Meditation Books,” was, looking back, a watershed moment for me, a kind of coming-out party. I wrote, for instance, that —

There is more to the universe — more to the ways we can think about it, be in it, and respond to it — than just logic and rationality. But logic and rationality are the only forms of thinking, being, and responding we are conditioned to value and teach in academia. Spirituality is an alternative, complementary way of thinking about, being in, and responding to the universe in which we live. It is a kind of thinking, feeling, and being that is very rarely, if ever, valued, taught, or practiced in academia, but which is nonetheless an essential form of problem-solving and thus an integral part of the liberal education of a well-rounded individual. (109)

That chapter was also a very successful merging of the most advanced theoretical thinking in my scholarly discipline (at that time) with a fuller accounting of my lived experience. It was a major step forward in my quest to feel whole in my writing. In that piece, I used social construction theory to argue that the quality, terms, range, goals, conventions, and grammatical/rhetorical structures of conversations about spirituality are the sources of the quality, terms, range, goals, conventions, and grammatical/rhetorical structures of an individual’s reflective, spiritual thought (111). What I recognized in the conclusion of that chapter served as a springboard for further scholarship and teaching: “Spirituality, I now see, is something that I do with language, both internally and externally. And so I have had the happy realization, for instance, that my teaching and my thinking about my teaching are important ways I can think spiritually and ‘do’ spirituality” (117).

But as I reflect here on what influence, what effects my embracing of the personal, emotional, and spiritual in my scholarship and teaching might have had on others in the field, I find it impossible to guess. These were brave moments for me, and I would like to think they might have inspired others to make similarly brave moves in their own scholarship and teaching, but there is no way to know, really. These were, after all, small pieces in small publications read by a small number of people who were already favorably inclined to these matters in the first place, or else they wouldn’t have been reading these books. That’s not false modesty; that’s a realistic assessment. But I am increasingly inclined to think on a more cosmic or absolute level about such things, I guess: if these texts helped even one writing teacher move even slightly closer toward a perspective, a decision, or an action that helped him/her write (or his/her students write) in a more fully human way, then that is work well done.

For myself, the most important outcome of my chapter in the Foehr and Schiller anthology seems to have been that in writing that piece I came to understand and talk about popular meditation books as a “concrete embodiment and enactment” of spirituality, to understand and talk about writing as embodying and enacting a way of being in the world. It was about this time (late 1997) that I came face to face with a very different way of being in the world from those I knew because this is when I learned that my son, Eli, was autistic. Becoming educated about autism, learning how to parent an autistic child, learning how to advocate on Eli’s behalf to his teachers and other caregivers and other similar matters quickly grew to command the time and energy I might have otherwise spent on reading and writing scholarship in my field.

This dynamic continued for a decade, really. During this period, old friends were kind enough to ask me to contribute pieces to their edited collections, but those texts did not constitute any great advancements in my thinking so much as render new variations on my familiar themes. But during this period I was also, however, engaged quite deeply on a daily basis of exploring how to understand my son, who, among other things, has a distinctive rhetoric, a fascinating way of using language, an unusual way of being in the world through language. In 2008, as a result of these circumstances, I vividly recalled something Jim Corder had said in passing in a lecture when I was doctoral student at TCU and that had clearly been percolating in my thinking ever since, though at an inarticulate level: that “Each [of us] is a rhetorical creation. Out of an inventive world (a past, a set of capacities, a way of thinking) [. . . we are] always creating structures of meaning and generating a style, a way of being in the world” (152). And following Corder, who defines rhetoric here as a way of being in the world through language, through invention, structure, and style, I came to understand that autism itself is a rhetoric, that autism is a way of being in the world through language, through invention, structure, and style, an argument I explicated with Melanie Yergeau in “Autism and Rhetoric” in College English in 2011. I will note here that this piece seems to have been picked up and used in a number of graduate courses in composition theory and pedagogy since it was published (based on the number of Google hits that point toward students’ blogged responses to the piece). I am pleased to know that our ideas on autism and rhetoric remain in circulation — and again, if these ideas move even one person even slightly closer to a perspective, decision, or action that allows them to treat some other person in a more fully human way, I would consider mine a career well spent.

But what has happened of late is that this idea — that rhetoric is a way of being in the world through language — has come to completely dominate my thinking. As I wrote in Writing on the Edge in 2011,

The implications of this concept are just now beginning to impress themselves upon me, and they are everywhere, and they are immense. If rhetoric is a way of being in the world through language, then discourses are ways of being in the world through language, through invention, structure, and style. And if discourses are ways of being in the world through language, then their constituent genres are ways of being in the world through language [. . .] ways of emerging into the world. (19)

In that essay, in an attempt to render just how important this concept is, just how personally critical this idea is, I invoked my history as a recovering alcoholic, telling the story of how a rhetoric of spirituality that I learned in a 12-Step program saved my life when I was a graduate student at Colorado State:

I sit, miserably at first, and listen to people talking about God, and honesty, and acceptance, and control, and selfishness, and fear; I learn, very haltingly, to begin talking about change, and pain, and growth, and healing, and faith the way that they speak of such things; and I begin, quite reluctantly at first, to read and write the texts that make me a member of this community. For instance, I am invited and compelled to write in new genres like the 4th Step, a rigorously honest inventory of those I have wronged and how I have done so, combined with a probing analysis of the part I have played in how others have wronged me. And I come, over time, to inhabit a new way of being in the world through language. And this new rhetoric, this new form of invention, structure, and style, this discourse and its constituent genres, saves my life by fundamentally altering how I am in the world. (23)

I concluded that essay with a series of questions for writing instructors, myself included. If genres are ways of being in the world through language, “When students take up your writing assignments, the genres you assign, how do they need to be in the world? How does the assigned genre require them to emerge into the world? How does it require them to exist in the world?” (30). And my own answers to these questions were unsettling, to say the least. It has become abundantly and painfully clear to me that the primary — and sometimes the only — way that academics — scholars and students alike — can be in the world is through adversarial violence, that is, through the symbolic and sublimated warfare of argument.

This is not a new idea, of course. In 1980, in The Metaphors We Live By, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson noted that “Our concepts structure what we perceive, how we get around in the world, and how we relate to other people” (4). And their very first example is “the conceptual metaphor [that] ARGUMENT IS WAR”:

It is important to see that we don’t just talk about arguments in terms of war. We can actually win or lose arguments. We see the person we are arguing with as an opponent. We attack his positions and defend our own. We gain and lose ground. We plan and use strategies. If we find a position indefensible, we can abandon it and take a new line of  [. . .] attack, defense, [or] counterattack [. . .] Try to imagine a culture where arguments are not viewed in terms of war, where no one wins or loses, where there is no sense of attacking or defending, gaining or losing ground [. . .T]his is the ordinary way of having an argument and talking about one. (4)

In war, alas, the ends can justify the means, and thus we come to the kinds of scorched-earth public discourse we can find almost anywhere in American culture, where opponents face off on television or in the comments section of webpages and attempt to annihilate each other with ever louder, ever more vicious, monologic, vitriolic, hate speech.

Thus, 30 years into my career (with 20 more to go, I hope), I have come to believe that we cannot effectively re-imagine the human condition as less violent using the same discursive tools that created our currently hostile conditions, that we cannot bridge our deep disagreements and schismatic worldviews using the same schemas of discourse that constructed today’s antagonistic realities. To create a less hostile and violent future, we need less hostile and violent discourses, and we need to teach these alternative ways of being in the world to students. I expect to spend the next two decades explicating just what this might mean. Some obvious starting points include the work we have already done on dialogue, intercultural communication, negotiation/mediation, conflict resolution, Rogerian rhetoric, and feminist alternatives to traditional argument, to name just a few. But the goal, once again — just as it was back when I was a GTA at Colorado State — is to find more fully human ways to express myself — ourselves — in writing. I am right where I have always been, it seems.

Even so, I have begun reading work in Peace Studies, and in the first text I read, Johan Galtung defines violence as follows: “violence is present when human beings are being influenced so that their actual somatic and mental realizations are below their potential realizations [. . . ] Violence is here defined as the cause of the difference between the potential and the actual, between what could have been and what is” (168). In what ways, I am called to wonder, does language use and instruction, especially writing instruction, reduce/inhibit/prevent someone from reaching his or her full human potential? In how many ways, and to how great a degree, is writing instruction therefore violent? From this perspective, I have been coming to nonviolence since I first began thinking critically about my work as a writing instructor, since I first balked at the radically truncated “humanity” forced upon my students via the comparison/contrast essay, since I first took up Winterowd’s challenge to use writing as means to help “students realize their full potential as liberally educated beings.” In my scholarly work to date, my goal, I now realize, has been to reduce the violence I do to myself, the violence I do to my experience as I attempt to render it, the violence I do to my humanity in that process, and the violence I do to my colleagues and students, as well. If any of these efforts have helped even one person move the tiniest bit toward a less violent way of being in the world themselves, it has been a career well spent.

I recognize, of course, that I am consoling myself in what might be construed as a mid-life crisis (of conscience): Oh my god! I’ve put in 30 years of hard work and I have nothing, NOTHING concrete to show for it. Perhaps. Given all my references here to “back when I was a grad student,” I can easily see how this might read like a mid-life crisis in print. But I have long known that I would not likely see overt and clear results for the work I do. Hell, any writing teacher knows that. We simply must believe in the “virus theory” of influence: that if we are lucky, we infect our students with ideas and aspirations that can lay dormant for a very long time before becoming fully functional, perhaps for years after they have left our classes, but once functional in a person, those ideas and aspirations can come to infect/affect other people in an increasingly large chain reaction. We also have to believe in the long haul. Teaching writing is an act of faith.

There is an apocryphal story about Jim Berlin that goes like this: “If you really want to make a difference in the world,” he is supposed to have said, “Then get out of teaching. Go man the barricades.” Again, perhaps. But I will end here by suggesting that we will only really change the world by laying down the tools with which we built it and coming to nonviolence. Changing the world begins with our next gesture, however small, to the next person we encounter, with the next thing we say or write, especially as a teacher.

 

Works Cited

Chödrön, Pema. Living Beautifully: with Uncertainty and Change. Boston, MA: Shambhala, 2013.

—–. The Places that Scare You: A Guide to Fearlessness in Difficult Times. Boston, MA: Shambhala, 2002.

—–. Taking the Leap: Freeing Ourselves from Old Habits and Fears. Boston, MA: Shambhala, 2010.

Corder, Jim W. “A New Introduction to Psychoanalysis, Taken as a Version of Modern Rhetoric.” Pre/Text 5.3-4 (1984): 137–69.

Galtung, Johan. “Violence, Peace, and Peace Research.” Journal of Peace Research 6.3 (1969): 167-191.

Heilker, Paul. The Essay: Theory and Pedagogy for an Active Form. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English, 1996.

—–. “On Genres as Ways of Being.” Writing on the Edge 21.2 (2011): 19-31.

—–. “The Rhetoric of Spirituality in Popular Meditation Books.” The Spiritual Side of Writing: Releasing the Learner’s Whole Potential. Eds. Regina Paxton Foehr and Susan A. Schiller. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1997. 107-117.

—–. “What I Know Now: The Personal and the Emotional in Teaching English.” Great Beginnings: Reflections and Advice for New English Language Arts Teachers and the People Who Mentor Them. Ed. Ira Hayes. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English, 1998. 73-80.

Heilker, Paul and Melanie Yergeau. “Autism and Rhetoric.” College English 73.5 (2011): 485-497.

Hodges, Elizabeth. “The Essay.” Message to Paul Heilker. 30 November 1998. E-mail.

Lakoff, George and Mark Johnson. The Metaphors We Live By. London: University of Chicago Press, 1980.

Laskaya, Anne C. “Re: Pleasure and Reading.” Message to Paul Heilker. 29 April 1997. E-mail.

Morgan, Dana. “Chrono-logic Presentation.” Message to Paul Heilker. 6 October 1997. E-mail.

Siegl, Kara. “Essays vs. thesis/support.” Message to Paul Heilker. 11 November 2002. E-mail.

Taylor, Pegi. “RE: THE ESSAY.” Message to Paul Heilker. 10 July 1997. E-mail.

Winterowd, W. Ross. “Rediscovering the Essay.” Journal of Advanced Composition 8 (1988): 146-157.

PSVP 3864 (ENGL 3864): Writing, Violence, and Nonviolence

I — Catalogue Description

Examination of the relationships among writing, violence, and nonviolence. Study of major figures and concepts in nonviolent rhetoric, with emphasis on alternatives to traditional argument. Instruction and practice in composing nonviolent texts. Pre: ENGL 1106, ENGL 1204H, or COMM 1016. (3H, 3C)

Course Number: PSVP 3864 (ENGL 3864)

ADP Title: Writing, Violence, Nonviolence

II — Learning Objectives

Having successfully completed this course, the student will be able to:

• Articulate the relationships of writing, violence, and nonviolence as they are enacted in specific genres of writing, such as argument, essay, negotiation, and arbitration;
• Explain the nonviolent rhetorical theories of key figures such as Deborah Tannen, Carl Rogers, Marshall Rosenberg, Jim W. Corder, and Barry Kroll;
• Interrogate key concepts of nonviolent rhetoric including empathy, dialogue, reflection, critical listening, and “common ground”;
• Explain the strengths and limitations of various approaches to nonviolent composition;
• Apply several approaches to nonviolent writing in contemporary rhetorical situations.

III — Justification

As Lakoff and Johnson noted over 30 years ago in Metaphors We Live By (University of Chicago Press, 1980), traditional western argument forces its users to relate to each other strictly through sublimated warfare: claiming a position, defending it against attacks, then counter-attacking and destroying the opposition. In like manner, in 2009, Deborah Tannen noted that contemporary society has become overwhelmingly adversarial, which has powerful negative effects on our ability to solve problems from the interpersonal to the international level. Students thus need to radically expand their options as scholars, professionals, and citizens to include theories and practices of nonviolent rhetoric and writing. Recent work in psychological counseling, linguistics, rhetorical theory, and composition pedagogy offers learners alternative concepts and tools of discourse with which to create a less hostile and violent future. Students in this seminar will study critical concepts in nonviolent rhetoric, survey a range of approaches to nonviolent writing, and then apply these alternative stances and tools to a significant contemporary rhetorical situation of their choosing.

Because of the emphasis on individualized research, application of theory, and the seminar style of the course, this course is appropriate for the 3000 level.

IV — Prerequisites and Corequisites

ENGL 1106, ENGL 1204H, or COMM 1016

Satisfactory completion of ENGL 1106/H1204 or COMM 1016 will provide students with knowledge and experience in the application of rhetorical theory, writing process, critical reading and thinking, and conventions of Edited American English necessary to engage effectively with the material and assignments in this course.

V — Texts and Special Teaching Aids

Brent, Doug. “Young, Becker and Pike’s ‘Rogerian’ Rhetoric: A Twenty-Year Reassessment.” COLLEGE ENGLISH 53 (1991): 452-66.

Corder, Jim W. “Argument as Emergence, Rhetoric as Love.” RHETORIC REVIEW 4 (1985): 16-32.

—–. “When (Do I/Shall I/May I/Must I/Is It Appropriate for Me to) (Say No To/Deny/Resist/ Repudiate/Attack/Alter) Any (Poem/ Poet/Other/Piece of the World) for My Sake?” RHETORIC SOCIETY QUARTERLY 13 (1988): 45-68.

Kroll, Barry M.  THE OPEN HAND: ARGUING AS AN ART OF PEACE.  Logan: Utah State University Press, 2013. 160 pp.

Ratcliffe, Krista. RHETORICAL LISTENING: IDENTIFICATION, GENDER, WHITENESS. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 2005. 248 pp.

Rogers, Carl R. “Communication: Its Blocking and its Facilitation.” ON BECOMING A PERSON. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1961. 329-337.

Rosenberg, Marshall. NONVIOLENT COMMUNICATION: A LANGUAGE OF LIFE. 2nd edition. Encinitas, CA: Puddledancer Press, 2003. 222 pp.

Tannen, Deborah. THE ARGUMENT CULTURE: STOPPING AMERICA’S WAR OF WORDS. New York: Ballantine Books, 2009. 384 pp.

VI — Syllabus                                                       

Relationships among writing, violence, and nonviolence — 20%

Major figures in nonviolent rhetoric — 20%

Major concepts in nonviolent rhetoric — 20%

Alternatives to traditional argument — 20%

Composing nonviolent texts — 20%

Zizek, Slavoj. Violence. New York: Picador. 2008. Print.

Zizek’s approach to discussing violence is decidedly sideways, as he notes that “the only appropriate approach to this subject thus seems to be one which permits variations on violence kept at a distance out of respect towards its victims” (4). He notes that there is subjective violence, or “violence performed by a clearly identifiable agent” (1), such as one person hitting another, which is what is most often identified as “violence.” He is most interested, however, in the two other kinds of violence: “symbolic violence embodied in language and its forms, what Heidegger would call ‘our house of being’” (1) and “systemic violence, or the often catastrophic consequences of the smooth functioning of our economic and political systems” (2). Zizek is concerned that these latter two forms of violence are invisible because they are seen as the normal state of society. In the example of the Soviet government forcing out the bourgeois, Zizek notes that the rich might have truly thought that they had done no violence to the proletariat, but claims that this is still violence, one of “the more subtle forms of coercion that sustain relations of domination and exploitation, including the threat of violence” (9).

Zizek is not afraid to offend his audience. He sees capitalism and its offspring, the so-called “liberal communists” who use their earnings from capitalistic societies to supposedly spread their wealth, as violent. In these systems, he feels that “this violence is no longer attributable to concrete individuals and their ‘evil’ intentions, but is purely ‘objective,’ systemic, anonymous” (13). In this way, no one individual can be seen as the harbinger of the ills that Zizek sees as inseparable from capitalism: the system itself is flawed.

Perhaps most notably, Zizek discusses the idea of tolerance in today’s society, in that everything is tolerable (all differences, all cultural foreignness), so long as the Other is not too close:

the proximity (of the tortured subject) which causes sympathy and makes torture unacceptable is not the victim’s mere physical proximity but, at its most fundamental, the proximity of the Neighbor, with all the Judeo-Christian-Freudian weight of this term, the proximity of the thing which, no matter how far away it is physical, is always by definition “too close.” (45)

In this way, Zizek can explain that the death of Americans on 9/11 was a tragedy to all Americans, whereas America’s response to invade multiple countries and kill many people was seen as not a tragedy, but a political strategy—Americans identified with the Americans killed in 9/11, but not those across the world.

The work goes on to discuss such varied topics as the Holocaust, 9/11, and human love and desire as violent acts, all within the rhetorical context that he constructs at the beginning of the work.

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Zizek was my first foray into the world of rhetoric, and thus I think he has shaped my ways of thinking about violence and language in ways that I am only beginning to discern. On language specifically, he notes: “The ‘wall of language’ which forever separates me from the abyss of another subject is simultaneously that which opens up and sustains the abyss—the very obstacle that separates me from the Beyond is what creates its mirage” (73). And, even more simply, the act of naming something is an act of violence, in that “Language simplifies the designated thing, destroying its organic unity, treating its parts and properties as autonomous” (61). In this way, isn’t calling someone an “Appalachian” as violent as calling someone a “redneck” or “hillbilly?” Or, in calling someone a “man” or “woman,” is the speaker not reducing them to a perceived set of gender markers and an assumption about their predispositions for strength, emotional capacity, or intelligence on any given subject? In this thread, allowing individuals to set their own definitions of self becomes exceedingly important, as they may see a seemingly innocuous title a violent offense.

Zizek is often controversial, sometimes whimsical, and fills this volume full of snarky and obviously judgmental overtones on the state of global affairs. This is fine if noted, but one should not take everything that he says as a fact or even as popular opinion; I doubt that all philosophers would agree with him, and certainly he is gaining no friends in the political sphere. With this in mind, one may use his definitions of violence and how he sees them operating in the world as tools with which we may speak about events such as mountaintop removal or the death of small towns across the United States.

I chose to begin with Zizek because I read this book when I was in my second semester of college, in the first classes where I was encouraged to think. This, of course, sent me into a tailspin—I attempted vegetarianism for nine months, began thinking critically about issues like women’s rights and racism, and wondered where I fit into this great machine of oppressions (because I did, in fact, fit into it, even by merit of being born in a capitalistic society). If I had not begun with Zizek, he would have been the large, often volatile elephant in the room.

— Emily Blair

Rosenberg, Marshall B.  Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life.  2nd Edition.  Encinitas, CA: PuddleDancer Press, 2003.  Print.

Rosenberg offers a schematic for NVC, or Nonviolent Communication, which he asserts “can be effectively applied at all levels of communication an in diverse situations,” including schools, organizations, diplomatic and business negotiations, and “disputes and conflicts of any nature” (8).  He begins by defining nonviolence as “our natural state of compassion when violence has subsided from the heart” (2), and he asks us to understand that “[b]ehind intimidating messages are merely people appealing to us to meet their needs” (99).  Once we adopt a perspective of NVC, Rosenberg suggests, “messages previously seen as critical or blaming begin to be seen for the gifts they are: opportunities to give to people who are in pain” (100).

In the first phase of the NVC process, he says, “we observe what is actually happening in a situation: what are we observing others saying or doing that is either enriching or not enriching our lives?  The trick is to be able to articulate this observation without introducing any judgment or evaluation–to simply say what other people are doing the we either like or don’t like” (6).  Rosenberg notes that these observations need to be “specific to time and context” (26) and identify “specific behaviors” that bother us (29).   Next, he writes, “we state how we feel when we observe this action: are we hurt, scared, joyful, amused, irritated?” (6).  Rosenberg notes that this very difficult for most people to do because “Our repertoire of words for calling people names is often larger than our vocabulary of words to clearly describe our emotional states” (37).  But by “developing a vocabulary of feelings that allows us to clearly and specifically name our emotions,” he suggests, “we can connect more easily with one another” (46).  In the third phase of NVC, according to Rosenberg, “we say what needs of ours are connected to the feelings we have identified” (6).  Again, this is very difficult because we are far “more skilled in analyzing the perceived wrongness of others than in clearly expressing our own needs” (53).  He notes that “most of us have never been taught to think in terms of needs.  We are accustomed to thinking about what’s wrong with other people when our needs aren’t being fulfilled” (53).  Nonetheless, Rosenberg maintains, “Judgments, criticisms, diagnoses, and interpretations of others are all alienated expressions of our [own unmet] needs.  If someone says, ‘You never understand me,’ they are really telling us that their need to be understood is not being fulfilled” (52).  Obviously, he notes, “If we express our needs, we have a better chance of getting them met” (53): “the moment people begin talking about what they need rather than what’s wrong with one another, the possibility of finding ways to meet everyone’s needs is greatly increased” (54).  Finally, in the fourth phase of NVC, we make very specific requests of “what we are wanting from the other person that would enrich our lives” (6).  In sum, as Rosenberg puts it,  “When our needs are not being fulfilled, we follow the expression of what we are observing, feeling, and needing with a specific request: we ask for actions that might fulfill our needs,” and and we do all this “in a way likely to inspire compassion” (67).

Empathy is a critical concept in NVC, and Rosenberg spends considerable time discussing it.  “Empathy is a respectful understanding of what others are experiencing,” he writes, a matter of “emptying our mind and listening with our whole being.”  Moreover, Rosenberg contends, “Empathy with others occurs only when we have successfully shed all preconceived ideas and judgments about them” (91).  And he notes that “The presence that empathy demands is not easy to maintain.”  It requires us to “give to others the time and space they need to express themselves fully and to feel understood” (92).  In sum, Rosenberg suggests, when we have empathized with others, we have “touched their humanness and realized the common qualities we share” (115): “When we settle our attention on other people’s feelings and needs, we experience our common humanity [. . .] When my consciousness is focused on another human being’s feelings and needs, I see the universality of our experience” (151).

Finally, Rosenberg makes a clear distinction between NVC and discourse we might usually consider stereotypically rhetorical: “If our objective is only to change people and their behavior or to get our way, then NVC is not an appropriate tool.”  The objective of NVC is not to persuade people to think or act in a certain way, but “to establish a relationship based on honesty and empathy,” and “our primary commitment is to the quality of the relationship” (81).  Nonetheless, by asserting that “NVC is not a set formula, but something that adapts to various situations as well as personal and cultural styles” (7), he nonetheless construes NVC as rhetorical in that it endlessly adapts to audience and occasion.

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Rosenberg presents NVC as a fully elaborated system, and while it does provide a structural schematic upon which pedagogical practices could be built, his discussion of NVC raises a number of important questions.  For instance, is compassion a “natural” state?  If so, how so?  Compassion, like patience and sharing (and a host of other “civilized” behaviors) would seem to go against some basic biology, against protecting my DNA at the expense of yours.  But perhaps compassion is not anti-biology if we take the larger perspective that we are herd animals and in our collective best interests.  If compassion is natural, then what would be the implications?  If compassion is natural, need it be taught?  If it is natural, can it be taught?  Rosenberg suggests that we do engage in all the elements of NVC “in a way likely to inspire compassion” (67).  Again, this points out the need to interrogate the nature of compassion?  What is it?  Where does it come from?  Is it, in fact, “inspired”?  Breathed into us from someone/something else?  Is it inherent and only needs to be drawn out?  How might we teach it?  In short, an elaborated theory of compassion is essential for any approach to nonviolence and communication.

Empathy is equally critical in Rosenberg’s scheme and equally ill-defined.  Empathy, he writes, a matter of “emptying our mind and listening with our whole being” (91), suggesting that empathy is something beyond merely cognitive, that it involves physical, emotional, and perhaps even spiritual natures.  In discussing empathy as presence, Rosenberg makes me think of Corder’s ideas about emergence, suggesting that listeners, too, have to emerge toward the other, and his suggestion that empathizing requires us to shed our preconceptions of the other suggests that mindfulness is a necessary prerequisite.  Mindfulness, is thus essential both for observing and for empathy in NVC: we need to learn to be fully present to the moment, dropping our internal dialogue, clearing the mind, so we can be fully present to another person.  Mindfulness, too, then, is something we would need to teach and practice in NVC.  Both Rosenberg and Corder contend that people need time and attention in order to emerge, need time and an audience in order to emerge, that we can’t really emerge without the necessary time and without someone to emerge toward.  If this is so, empathy is not something that one person gives or offers another; it is something that people can only do together.  Both parties have to emerge and be fully present to each other and give each other time.  Furthermore, Rosenberg suggests that when we have empathized with others, we have “touched their humanness and realized the common qualities we share” (115).  What then, is the relationship between empathy and identification?  They would seem to be practically the same experience.  How do Burke’s ideas fit in here?  Is nonviolent communication, then, the search for empathy/identification, the very essence of New Rhetoric, the means of overcoming our biological separateness?  In short, we need a fully elaborated theory of empathy to inform nonviolent communication, one that integrates concepts of compassion and identification, among others.

Rosenberg’s emphasis on the need for observation without evaluation makes me think of Elbow’s ideas about rendering (as well as Buddhist ideas about mindfulness), about discourse that renders reality without analyzing it.  That’s a kind of discourse we don’t usually teach, but certainly could.  How might we practice that kind of writing?  What models might we emulate?

I concur that identifying feelings is hard for us, and one of the main reasons it is hard is academic discourse is entirely about logos.  We have no practice in talking about emotions in any concerted or systematic way, and since we have no common discourse for dealing with emotions, we have nothing to internalize as reflective thought about it.  What he is calling for is something I would call “emotional or pathetic literacy.”  But how do we teach it?  Surely, simply providing lists of vocabulary for students to memorize won’t do it.  We need to start having specific, detailed, elaborated conversations about emotional states so that students can begin to internalize this discourse as reflective thought.  There needs to be regular, communal talk that provides grammar of emotions, that embodies and enacts the quality, terms, range, goals, conventions, and rhetorical structures of conversations about the emotions which students can become fluent in and internalize.  Beyond that, there could/should be daily exercises to help them become fluent in expressing emotions, daily opportunities where they are asked to describe their actual emotional states.

In like manner, we have no vocabulary or discourse about needs we can internalize either.  What are our needs?  How can we teach people to identify which need is operating at a given moment, driving them?  How can we help people, teach people to express these needs?  What taxonomies of needs would be most helpful in this regard?

Rosenberg glosses the entire NVC process as follows: “When our needs are not being fulfilled, we follow the expression of what we are observing, feeling, and needing with a specific request: we ask for actions that might fulfill our needs” (67).  These are all skills that can and ought to be taught: how to render experience, how to identify and express feelings, how to identify and express needs, and how to request specific actions.  That’s a whole writing curriculum right there.

When Rosenberg notes that judgments, criticisms, diagnoses, interpretations are all expressions of unmet needs, all I can think is that academic discourse, then, is all about our unmet needs, since it is nothing but a litany of judgments, criticisms, diagnoses, and interpretations.  So what unmet needs lie behind it?  Our needs for certainty, security, control, and foundational knowledge are obviously places to start.

Finally, it would be good to investigate O. J. Harvey’s research at the University of Colorado that is supposed to show that the frequency of words that classify and judge people in a culture strongly correlates with the number of violent incidents in a culture.  Should it prove to be persuasive research, it would be a powerful perspective to bring to conversations about language and (non)violence.

— Paul Heilker

Morrison, Toni.  “Nobel Lecture.”  Nobelprize.org. Nobel Media AB 2014. Web. 8 Oct 2014. <http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1993/morrison-lecture.html>

Morrison uses a story of a wise, blind woman and young visitors who come to test her clairvoyance as a frame for a scorching indictment on the violences of language and our common culpability for letting them continue.  Speaking for her protagonist, Morrison is worried about how language is “withheld from her for certain nefarious purposes.”  She defines a dead language as “unyielding language content to admire its own paralysis [. . .] censored and censoring.  Ruthless in its policing duties, it has no desire or purpose other than maintaining [. . .] its own exclusivity and dominance.  However moribund, it is not without effect for it actively thwarts the intellect, stalls conscience, suppresses human potential” (para. 11).  Moreover, Morrison says, “The systematic looting of language can be recognized by the tendency of its users to forego its nuanced, complex, mid-wifery properties for menace and subjugation.  Oppressive language does more than represent violence; it is violence; does more than represent the limits of knowledge; it limits knowledge.”  Such language, she writes, “tucks its fascist boots under crinolines of respectability and patriotism as it moves relentlessly toward the bottom line and the bottomed-out mind.  Sexist language, racist language, theistic language — all are typical of the policing languages of mastery, and cannot, do not permit new knowledge or encourage the mutual exchange of ideas” (para. 13).  Morrison carefully delineates the social effects of such language: “There is and will be rousing language to keep citizens armed and arming, slaughtered and slaughtering in the malls, courthouses, post offices, playgrounds, bedrooms and boulevards; stirring memorializing language to mask the pity and waste of needless death.  There will be more diplomatic language to countenance rape, torture, assassination” (para. 14).

But Morrison spends the second half of her address pointing toward an alternative, a way out.  For instance, she points out the foolishness and deathliness of monologic discourses: “She has thought about what could have been the intellectual history of any discipline if it had not insisted upon, or been forced into, the waste of time and life that rationalization for and represnetations of dominance required — lethal discourses of exclusion blocking access to cognition for both the excluder and the excluded” (para. 16).  Morrison similarly offers a political/pedagogical agenda for responding to oppressive language in its many guises: “Whether it is obscuring state language or the faux-language of mindless media; whether it is the proud but calcified language of the academy or the commodity driven language of science; whether it is the malign language of law-without-ethics, or language designed for the estrangement of minorities [. . .] it must be rejected, altered, exposed” (para. 13)

And Morrison insists that, despite the difficulties if not impossibilities, the attempt to offer the next generation some other kind of linguistic inheritance is of critical importance.  Speaking for the young visitors who come to test the wise woman, she articulates a series of questions and ends in a call for us to own that responsibility:

• “‘Is there no speech,’ they ask her, ‘no words you can give us that helps break through your dossier of failures?'” (para. 26)
• “‘Do we have to begin consciousness with a battle heroines and heroes like you have already fought and lost . . .?” (para. 28)
• “Our inheritance is an affront.  You want us to have your old, blank eyes and see only cruelty and mediocrity.  Do you think we are stupid enough to perjure ourselves again and again with the fiction of nationhood?  How dare you talk to us of duty when we stand waist deep in the toxin of your past?'” (para.29)
• “Is there no context for our lives?  No song, no literature, no poem full of vitamins, no history connected to experience that you can pass along to help us start strong?” (para. 30)
• “Make up a story.  Narrative is radical, creating us at the very moment it is created.  We will not blame you if your reach exceeds your grasp; if love so ignites your words they go down in flames and nothing is left but their scald.”  (para. 30)
• “We know you can never do it properly — once and for all.  Passion is never enough; neither is skill.  But try [. . .] Don’t tell is what to believe, what to fear.  Show us belief’s wide skirt and the stitch that unravel’s fear’s caul” (para. 30)

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There are strong resonances in Morrison’s address to Galtung’s definition of violence as anything that limits our reaching our full human potential.  She notes that unyielding, policing, exclusionary, dominant discourses are dead because they “thwart human potential.”  She defines oppressive language as violence, noting that it limits knowledge and moves relentlessly toward diminished mental capacity (“the bottom-out mind”).  But Morrison also explicitly links language use to menace, subjugation, fascism, death, slaughter, death, torture, rape, and assassination.

Less directly, Morrison suggests that “Word-work is sublime [. . .] because it is generative; it makes meaning that secures our difference, our human difference — the way in which we are like no other life” (para. 20).  “We die,” she writes, and “That may be the meaning of life.  But we do language.  That may be the measure of our lives” (para. 21).  The extent to which we reach our full potential as language users, then, would be the measure of our humanity, our human difference.  The range of ways in which we can do language, the degree to which we reach our full potential as language users is, then, the measure of our lives.  Similarly, Morrison writes that “The vitality of language lies in its ability to limn the actual, imagined, and possible lives of its speakers, readers, and writers” (para. 18).  The full life-force of a language lies its ability to depict, describe, or portray our imagined and possible lives, our full human potential.

But my real take-away from her address is a feeling of obligation, of being called to do what may be impossible but is utterly necessary nonetheless.  Early in the piece, Morrison writes that “when language dies, out of carelessness, disuse, indifference and absence of esteem, or killed by fiat [. . . ] all users and makers are accountable for its demise” (para. 12).  We are all on the hook, then, for the current state of affairs, for the desperately impoverished and ever-narrowing kinds of discourse that exist in the civic/public sphere.  There are other kinds of discourses that we have allowed to wither and die, that we are not valuing, using, or teaching.  When Morrison decries the “tongue-suicide [ . . .] common among the infantile heads of state and power merchants whose evacuated language leaves them with no access to what is left of their human instincts for they speak only to those who obey, or in order to force obedience” (para. 12), I recognize that we have all allowed this infantile, evacuated language to exist, to remain, to gain ascendancy, that we have all contributed to a discourse that alienates us and forbids us access to our full range of human instincts by not valuing, using, and teaching an alternative discourse.  We are complicit in our collective tongue-suicide.

In the end, I leave Morrison’s address inspired.  We can develop a rhetoric of nonviolence; we can compose nonviolence.  There are words we can give the next generation that will help them break through our dossier of failures.  They don’t need to begin consciousness with a battle we have already lost.  We can offer them an inheritance that is not toxic.  We can pass along words that will help them start strong, a narrative that will create them at the very moment we are creating it.  We can show them how to believe rather than only, merely doubt, how to unravel the fear with which we have come to clothe ourselves.  We can and we must.

— Paul Heilker

 

Lamb, Catherine E.  “Beyond Argument in Feminist Composition.”  College Composition and Communication 42.1 (1991): 11-24.  Print.

“As a culture, we learn much more about how to repress or ignore conflict than how to live with and transform it,” Lamb writes.  “When we practice monologic argument as an end, we are teaching students that conflict can be removed by an effort that is fundamentally one-sided” (18).   She asserts, however, that “a resolution of conflict that is fair to both sides [. . .] is possible even in the apparent one-sidedness of written communication” (11).  First she notes the ubiquity of monological argument, “the way most (all?) of us were taught to conceptualize arguments: what we want comes first, and we use the available means of persuasion to get it, in, one hopes, ethical ways.  We may acknowledge the other side’s position but only to refute it [. . .] We have uncritically assumed there was no other way to write” (13).  Lamb then suggests that “empathy, the ability to think or feel as the other,” is essential in conflict resolution.  But in connecting with the other, she writes, “it is critical that one already has and retains a sense of one’s self.  The process requires, ultimately, more recognition and honoring of difference than it does searching for common ground” (16).  Thus, we still need argument “at the early stages of resolving a conflict, where both parties need to be as clear as possible about what they think and feel.”

The “alternative to the self-assertiveness of monologic argument is not self-denial,” Lamb contends, but the cultivation of a “sense of spaciousness” (17): a “paradoxical situation where the distance between the writer and audience is lessened (as they explore the dimensions of the conflict together) while the ‘space’ in which they are operating has enlarged because they see more possibilities” (18).  According to Lamb, in both negotiation and mediation “the goal has changed: it is no longer to win but to arrive at a solution in a just way that is acceptable to both sides” (18).  It is important to note that negotiation and mediation are “structured forms of conflict resolution,” she says.  The “guidelines which provide the structure are the mechanism whereby space between the two parties can be increased, making it possible for the distance between them to be lessened as they move toward each other” (19).  Finally, Lamb offers a précis of the pedagogy she uses in advanced writing courses to teach students how to negotiate and mediate.

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The goal of nonviolence is not to eliminate or repress conflict, although I think that this is likely a common misconception.  Rather the goal of nonviolence is to help us learn to engage in conflict in healthy ways, ways that bring us together rather than force us apart, ways that are collaborative rather than one-sided, ways that are mutually beneficial rather than primarily self-interested.  I am intrigued, then, by the spatial metaphor that Lamb invokes, the idea that we can lessen the distance and move closer to those we disagree with by creating more (lateral) space in which to move.  How might these larger space actually be created?  How, exactly, do negotiation and mediation structure these spaces?  How might other alternatives to argument structure these spaces?  What kinds of new “moves” might we make in these new spaces that would allow us to move closer to those we are in conflict with?  In like manner, I appreciate the developmental model she suggests, where monological discourse (like argument) is a critical and necessary precursor to successful negotiation and mediation.  But some thorny questions emerge pretty quickly as well.  For instance, what written discourse forms might allow us to actually embody/enact/conduct negotiation or mediation, rather then merely document the antecedent verbal processes of it, especially given “the apparent one-sidedness of written communication”?  In like manner, certain terms emerge here that are going to need considerable scrutiny to be useful and not obfuscatory.  What, exactly, does “empathy” mean?  How does it operate?  Any effort on my part to teach nonviolence is going to need a well-articulated, elaborated theory of empathy.  [I am reminded here of Yergeau’s discussion of how neurotypicals arrogantly think autistics cannot empathize with them but that they can somehow empathize with autistics.]  In like manner, the ubiquitous invocation of “finding common ground” makes me nervous, too, and needs a thorough explication.  Every time it pops up I hear Trimbur’s old critique about the tyranny of consensus in my head, of how efforts to find common ground can default to lowest common denominators and thus prevent any productive uses of dissensus.

— Paul Heilker

Galtung, Johan.  “Cultural Violence.”  Journal of Peace Research 27.3 (1990): 291-305.  Print.

This article explores the concept of “cultural violence” as a follow-up to Galtung’s ideas on structural violence.  Cultural violence is “defined here as any aspect of a culture that can be used to legitimize violence in its direct or structural form.  Symbolic violence built into a culture does not kill or maim like direct violence or the violence built into the structure.  However, it is used to legitimize both.”  Galtung writes that “By ‘cultural violence’ we mean those aspect of culture, the symbolic sphere of our existence — exemplified by religion and ideology, language and art, empirical science and formal science (logic, mathematics) — that can be used to justify or legitimize direct or structural violence.”  According to Galtung, “Cultural violence makes direct and structural violence look, even feel, right — or at least not wrong” (291).  He offers a useful scheme to help differentiate among the three terms in his analytic: “Direct violence is an event; structural violence is a process with ups and downs; cultural violence is an invariate, a ‘permanence'” (294).  He notes, though, that “Generally, a causal flow from cultural via structural to direct violence can be identified.  The culture preaches, teaches, admonishes, eggs on, and dulls us into seeing exploitation and/or repression as normal and natural, or into not seeing them (particularly not exploitation) at all” (295).  One way that cultural violence works, Galtung contends, is by “making reality opaque, so that we do not see the violent act or fact, or at least not as violent.  Obviously this is more easily done with some forms of violence than others” (292).

Galtung’s piece foregrounds a number of connections between language and violence. He notes, for example, that cultural violence works internally on people: “‘alienation’ can be defined in terms of socialization, meaning the internalization of a culture.  There is a double aspect: to be desocialized away from own culture and to be socialized into another culture — like the prohibition and imposition of languages” (293).  Galtung underscores another function of language in cultural violence through the example of American slavery, in which centuries of massive direct violence that caused the death of millions of people, massive structural violence sedimenting the white/black hierarchy in the U.S., and massive cultural violence supporting ubiquitous racist ideas gets reduced and “forgotten” until “only two labels show up, pale enough for college textbooks: ‘discrimination’ for massive structural violence and ‘prejudice’ for massive cultural violence.  Sanitation of language: itself cultural violence” (295).  The author directly cites the movement toward the use of inclusive language as “a good example of deliberate cultural transformation away from cultural violence,” but he also observes that “there are more subtle aspects of language where the violence is less clear, more implicit,” that “certain space and time rigidities imposed by Indo-European languages” result in “a corresponding rigidity in the logical structure” (299).  Galtung’s analysis even extends to “the substratum of the culture,” arguing that at this level “occidental culture shows so many violent features that the whole culture starts looking violent.  There is chosenness, there are strong center-periphery gradients.  There is the urgency, the apocalypse now! syndrome [. . . and] a strong tendency to individualize and rank human beings, breaking up the unity-of-man” (301)

Finally, Galtung acknowledges the irony of pursuing a peace culture, which he notes is “problematic because of the temptation to institutionalize that culture, making it obligatory with the hope of internalizing it everywhere.  And that would already be direct violence, imposing a culture” (291).

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Galtung’s expanded perspective in this article is helpful in considering the larger contexts of structural violence.  The concept of cultural violence urges us to consider the larger narratives of violence that undergird and influence our educational systems and which our writing pedagogies reproduce.  To what extent does literacy/writing instruction reinscribe the American Dream, the myth of the radical individualism and self-sufficiency, the cult of masculinity at the heart of “Horatio Alger” stories?  How much of what we take as “natural,” necessary, justified, or legitimate in writing instruction is, in fact, veiled matters of cultural violence, such as grouping students by abilities?  How much of our professional practice — such as our acquiescence to the “necesssity” of standardized tests of writing ability or of assigning A-F letter grades to students’ performances — serves to legitimize structural violence in our culture?  Galtung’s ideas are making me hyper-aware of how blind I have become to the violence of schooling in general.  What else can we make of a system that overtly deploys two very specific types of violence: “detention, meaning locking people in (prisons, concentration camps), and expulsion, meaning locking people out (banishing them abroad or to distant parts of the country)” (293)?

I am struck by Galtung’s discussions of the linguistic nature of violence, including the sanitation of language — which resonates with Toni Morrison’s Nobel address — and the deep structural violence of Indo-European languages.  Similarly, I think there is great power in his discussion of the “steep Self-Other gradients that drive wedges in social space” in our culture.  To what extent does our teaching of audience awareness serve to reinscribe these self-other gradients?  To what extent does writing instruction work against the experience of empathy?  Even the idea of “voice” becomes suspect in this light, a celebration of the radically individualized, starkly demarcated from the voices of others.

I think it is clear that progressive educators, especially, may be blind to the violence of our efforts.  What we understand as efforts at empowerment are just as easily understood as matters of violence.  Think here of the concept of “community” in writing instruction.  Who could, who would, refuse the offer of “community,” with its warm sense of tolerance and support?  But since we have still not worked out the dynamics of the Students’ Right to Their Own Language, our offer of “community” and “empowerment” becomes an implicit command to become alienated to one’s home culture.  Still, I’m not sure that Galtung’s solution to this question is practicable: “non-violent socialization is to give the child a choice, e.g. by offering him/her more than one cultural idiom” (293).  Unless that range of offered idioms is universal, unlimited, then any idioms we offer is a violent truncation of the possibilities.  The question, then, is not how we can make certain aspects of writing instruction non-violent, perhaps, but less violent.  It is increasingly clear that even pursuing writing and nonviolence is a potentially coercive agenda, that any educational efforts at making writing/nonviolence a course expectation or requirement would be an act of violence in itself.  Can such teaching ever be more than an invitation?  

— Paul Heilker