Performing Authority: Gysin, Bergvall, and the Critique of Expressivist Pedagogy

Performing Authority: Gysin, Bergvall, and the Critique of Expressivist Pedagogy Tom Orange (bio) According to the conventional narrative, Composition Studies evolved as a discipline through a series of paradigm shifts over the past forty or fifty years. Under the mode of “current-traditional rhetoric,” which prevailed into the 1960s, writing instruction was chiefly a matter of correcting grammar and mastering rhetorical conventions. Beginning in the late 1960s, with the rejection of institutional authority characterizing much social movement of that decade, the focus of writing instruction shifted toward the student writer as a person: through attention to the writing process over the written product, the discovery and cultivation of the writer’s self or voice through written expression would help liberate her from the authority of rules and conventions (grammatical, rhetorical, and by implication social). Such a mission grew increasingly important as open admissions policies of the 1970s increased the ranks of non-traditional and less-well-prepared students in university classrooms. By the early 1980s, however, composition scholars grew critical of this once progressive expressivist or process-oriented paradigm. Notions of the writer finding her individual voice as a means of asserting the self’s autonomy seemed naive in the face of social realities. Student writers came to be seen as much if not more constructed by various authorizing voices than by their own [End Page 115] voices. Thus, postprocess pedagogies sought to help students to recognize the social, cultural, and institutional situatedness of their writing. There are close and distant parallels to be drawn, I think, between this disciplinary narrative and those that could be constructed for other areas of language, literature, and literacy studies: English, Creative Writing, Literary Theory, Linguistics, Communications, and so on. For example, current traditional approaches to composition clearly have a parallel in New Critical approaches to literature. By contrast, so-called Language Poetry as it emerged in the academy in the 1980s presented a critique of individual voice and expression and the workshop model of confessional narrative poetry at the heart of much Creative Writing pedagogy. Language Poetry also paralleled the rise of theory in English departments: while historically coterminous with the ascendancy of expressivist pedagogy in the 1970s and 1980s, theory likewise challenged the very notions of a cohesive self independent of social forces that seemed so central to voicist rhetoric and metaphors in composition. Such parallels and intersections between and within the disciplines can be most productively considered when they help us understand and contextualize our work in new ways. And so, to the question of the role voice and voice metaphors can and should play in composition studies and pedagogy, this essay proposes a new perspective, one from a neglected and therefore perhaps surprising creative writing subgenre: text-sound poetry. Emerging in part from 1960s avant-garde efforts in multimedia and musical composition, text-sound poetry features recordings of spoken text that can then be subject to manipulation or collaging with other sounds, images, etc. I will consider here recorded excerpts of three different text-sound pieces. “Come to Free the Words” was first executed in 1962 by Brion Gysin, with whose work Caroline Bergvall has recently engaged, recording her own version of “Come to Free the Words” as well as a new piece in direct response to it. As I will show, these three text-sound works (cd tracks 11, 12, and 13) offer useful insights into the efficacy of “voice” in thinking about and teaching writing: between process and postprocess, between academic voice and the student’s attempt to master it, Bergvall’s work envisions a “subvoicive” third way. Before considering her work, I want to flesh out the terms and stakes of this debate a bit further, starting with one possible implication in the disciplinary history sketched above, namely that Composition Studies, having moved through its current traditional and process-oriented modes, now operates in a fully postprocess mode. In fact, nothing could be further from the case. Disciplinary histories are of course rarely linear, with emergent, [End Page 116] dominant, and residual formations (to use the parlance of Raymond Williams) always existing contemporaneously, and while postprocess critiques such as those by David Bartholomae and Patricia Bizzell have...

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