This last contention is borne out for many of us by our experience working in the area of writing across the curriculum. What many of us discovered when we spread out across the curriculum to help teachers in other disciplines improve their students’ writing was that we were actually in the business of helping their students write better arguments. Or to put the matter more precisely, we were helping faculty in other disciplines teach their students how to argue like members of a discipline as much as teaching them how to write like members of a discipline. Teaching the formats for essays in psychology or physics proved to be relatively simple. But making students aware of the assumptions embedded in those formats, assumptions about the relative evidentiary weight different formats accorded to primary and secondary sources, experimental data, theory, anomaly, etc., proved to be a considerably more challenging task.
We, the agents of WAC, were in effect reprising the role of our Sophist ancestors; we were the metics, the foreigners passing through a territory, simultaneously handicapped by our outsider status and empowered by it. What may have struck a member of a disciplinary community as a demonstration of truth looked to many of us, with our new eyes, like a persuasive gambit. Like Moliere’s Monsieur Jourdain who is surprised to learn that he has been speaking prose his whole life, many of our colleagues in other disciplines were surprised to learn that they had been using and teaching rhetoric the whole time. Once they achieved this awareness, many of these same colleagues became major proponents of a focus on argument not only in their own courses but in the writing courses we taught to prepare students for their disciplines. As we shall demonstrate in chapter two, the approaches used in contemporary argument courses, are eminently adaptable to other disciplines.
Argument and Identity
One of the more controversial aspects of critical literacy concerns the connections it draws between critical thought and identity. In urging students to become more reflective thinkers, proponents of critical literacy call attention to various forces in the world that undermine people’s sense of agency and entice them to pursue ends inimical to a healthy sense of self and community. They call attention to ways in which the decisions we make on a daily basis, as consumers, workers and citizens, decisions about what to eat, how to advance ourselves in the workplace and who to vote for, both reveal who we are and reinforce, for good or ill, our self-understanding. Sellers of soap, management gurus and political consultants all have an interest not just in understanding who we are, but in shaping a self congruent with their ends, not ours. Students need thus to be reflective about these choices, made aware of the implications of some of their choices, and alert to the persuasive gambits common to those who encourage them to assume these identities.
This can prove to be a challenging task. Students are often strongly resistant to an emphasis on the relationship between who they are the everyday choices they make. They do not like the implicit suggestion that they might be the dupes of some shadowy group of “hidden persuaders,” and they do not like the idea of having to pay so much attention to choices and decisions that heretofore have been effortlessly made. Aren’t we making a mountain out of a molehill, they suggest, to shower so much critical attention on a lowly ad or a selection from a pop business book? Anyone who has taught a literature course will recognize the response. They are skeptical that anything so simple on the surface could have all this depth of meaning. The various concerns that students express about applying the lessons of critical literacy to their everyday life need to be taken into account. On the one hand, they are right to insist on their own resourcefulness and their own ability to keep their distance from the identities being proferred them by so many different interest groups. Many of them have thought critically about at least some of these choices and we always find a few students in every class who are in fact militantly on guard against external assaults on their identities. But on the other hand, many students underestimate how skillfully those who fashion off-the-rack identities for them manage to ingratiate themselves through the use of humor, irony, self deprecation and self-revelation, and numerous other devices designed to disarm them. In approaching the relationship between argument and identity, thus, it is important to respect students’ position and experience in this area and to take it slowly at the outset. We like to begin the discussion of identity with a look at some of the most prevalent techniques used by those with prefabricated identities to sell, techniques to which none of us are invulnerable.
Consider, for example, one of most effective devices used by advertisers, political consultants and management gurus to disarm American audiences: the appeal to rugged individualism. Whether it is the politician who professes to ignore the polls and follow his gut, the manager who scoffs at conventional wisdom and dares to be great, or the male model dressed in cowboy garb who lights up a cigarette and laughs at death, Americans have long been susceptible to the charms of the rugged individual in all his many guises. Indeed, the easiest way to sell a mass American audience on behaviors or choices that have questionable consequences is to present that choice as an expression of rugged individualism. Rugged individualism constitutes what Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca call a loci, “premises of a general nature that can serve as the bases for values and hierarchies” (84). The premise represented by the model of the rugged individual is perhaps most economically summed up by the categorical imperative of the code hero: “A man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do.” One listens to one’s inner manhood to intuit the best course of action and follows that guidance in the face of convention, popularity, lawfulness and personal risk. Like all loci, the model of the rugged individual draws its life from many streams, in particular, American history and American popular culture. A country born of revolution and nurtured on the “conquest” of a receding frontier, a country whose economic system is based on risk taking and competition, a country whose entertainment industry has provided a steady stream of cowboys, private dicks, rags to riches entrepreneurs and gang bangers in every medium—this is a country with rugged individualism buried deep in its DNA. Which is why the simple act of associating a brand, a product, a choice, a person, a candidate, or a proposal with rugged individualism has been so effective down through the years in forwarding the interests of its sponsor. But in the act of choosing whatever it is that the sponsor wishes us to choose, we further the hold of that identity on the national imagination, ensure its continued repetition and reinforce the rugged individual’s status as a behavioral model.
But those who use the rugged individual understand that the ur-vision of the rugged individual—call it the John Wayne version—has limited appeal for denizens of various boxes on the psychographic grid and so they craft variations on the central model that speak most saliently to those to whom they are pitching their product. For some, the macho version of non-conformity is a turnoff and so they require a kinder, gentler version. Consider for example the charming, mildly amusing ad campaign for Apple Computing featuring personifications of the “MAC” and “PC” computer lines. Whereas the PC is personified as a plump, stuffy suit, with an exceedingly narrow view of his job description and a tendency to whine about his users’ need to demand too much of him, MAC is personified as a skinny, hip, stylishly rumpled younger guy open to new possibilities, puzzled by PC’s complaints about his users’ demands and bemused by the PC persona. It is a classic conflict, albeit a soothingly muted one, between the staid “company man” and the edgy rebel, the bureaucrat and the innovator.
The current ad is a far tamer version of the classic Apple Super Bowl ad of 1984 introducing the Mac line of computers, featuring a woman eluding storm troopers to shatter a huge television screen where Big Brother is pontificating before an auditorium full of bowed figures. (While it might be tempting to see the advertisers’ choice of a female figure for the role of rugged individual as a sign of advanced social awareness, it is more likely a reflection of their concern to hit a particular demographic.) The earlier version of the “rebel v suits” advertisement suggests that a good deal more is at stake in the choice between conformity and individualism and, by implication, between the choice