The turn to performance
A Special Issue of CCC Online
Edited by Jenn Fishman
Contributors: Daniel Anderson, Jackclyn Ngo, Sydney Stegall, and Kyle Stevens; Mark McBeth, Ian Barnard, Aneil Rallin, Jonathan Alexander, and Andrea A. Lunsford; Keith Dorwick, Bob Mayberry, Paul M. Puccio, and Joona Smitherman Trapp; Kevin DiPirro; Jim Henry; Jamie “Skye” Bianc; Jacqueline Rhodes and Jonathan Alexander.
Introduction: Turning to Performance
I: Thematic Prologue
The house lights dim. The buzz and hum of voices rises briefly and dies out. In the darkness, the outline of a figure dressed in techie blacks appears downstage right. After a beat a spotlight rises, and the figure becomes recognizable as "The Turn to Performance"Special Issue Editor.
As the SIE steps forward an off-key electronic melody bursts from the back of the house. A brief lightshow follows; cell phones flash on and are turned off. There is a final chorus of electronics powering down. A camera's click and flash is followed by laughter and scattered shushing noises.
When it is quiet, the SIE walks across the stage and stops just left of center, where a standing desk and keyboard have been set. After adjusting the desk height and adjusting it again, the SIE pauses briefly and begins typing.
We turn to performance for the first issue of CCC Online not only to bring attention to current performance work in rhetoric and composition, communication, and related fields, but also to return to ideas and concerns that have been central from the very start of both the CCCC and the organization's flagship journal. In 1950, inaugural College Composition and Communication editor Charles W. Roberts might have included performance among the "ideas [that] run like a refrain" through the journal's first volume (3). Over four issues ranging in length from 16 to 44 pages each, contributors addressed everything from "different methods [that] are used to place freshman writing before the students in composition classes" (Wells 3) and "making room for reading, speaking, listening, observing, and demonstrating" alongside writing in FYC (Stabley 7) to determining "[w]hat shall be included in the physical set-up" of writing laboratories (Workshop 9 32) and "setting up a workable method of teaching [students] how to improve their writing" (Drake 3).
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More than sixty years later, although some of the terms and examples may have changed our interest in performance remains. Today we circulate students' writing performances through course management software and e-publications as well as poetry slams, digital storytelling sites, and a multitude of printed forms. Working to reconnect the third and fourth Cs, colleagues at Stanford, the University of Colorado-Boulder, the University of Kentucky, and elsewhere model new curricula that combine written and oral discourse. Consider the course offerings and activities hosted by the Program in Writing and Rhetoric, the Program for Writing and Rhetoric, and Composition and Communication, respectively. And consider educators' efforts to improve teaching and learning and to document improvement, not only in brick and mortar settings but also in virtual and hybrid sites of instruction.
Together, these praxes contribute to a working definition of performance for our field(s). Of course, that definition also includes examples with much longer histories. The Oxford English Dictionary reminds us that "performance" can been understood as "[t]he accomplishment or carrying out of something commanded or undertaken" (c.1487), "[a] literary, artistic, or other creative work; a composition" (c.1665), and "[t]he observable or measurable behaviour of a person or animal in a particular, usually experimental, situation" (c.1898). Within the Greco-Roman Anglophone rhetorical tradition, performance is sometimes a synonym for rhetoric, especially oratory and other forms of oral communication. It also can carry a strong negative connotation, associated with the most superficial aspects of delivery as well as nonverbal and nonrational elements of persuasion. In Perform or Else, Jon McKenzie offers yet another definition. Focusing on the present rather than the past, he identifies performance as an episteme in the Foucaultian sense, and he argues that performance understood in three distinct registers—cultural, technical, and organizational—frames or delimits the production of knowledge in contemporary, post-1950s global society (12, 17-18).
Certainly, all three registers of performance can be found in the annals of rhetoric, composition, and communication, including the pages of CCC, and back issues document some of the many ways that performance has enabled us to create "a new subject of knowledge" (18). According to McKenzie, contemporary subjects are marked by "[h]yphenated identities, transgendered bodies, digital avatars, and the Human Genome Project," as well as the copia of connectivity made possible by digital media and the Internet (18).These markers are evident in CCC, especially publications from the last decade, but they are eclipsed by even more plentiful examples of cultural, technological, and organizational performances. Teachers and scholars from volume 1 onward examine writing as a powerful producer of culture and, at the same time, an important cultural artifact. Likewise, essays on instructional spaces, textbooks, and computer-assisted writing attest to our steady interest in the effectiveness of available resources for both writing instruction and writing itself. Additionally, our concern with assessment tracks from the first print appearance of the word performance in a 1950 CCCC workshop report (43) to Cornelius Cosgrove's recent argument for a graduate-focused approach to writing program evaluation.
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Confirming the "contemporariness" of college composition and communication, the turn to performance is an occasion for us to refine our understanding of how performance operates within our field(s). Individually and together, the multimedia in this issue highlight our long-term investment in writing performances as not only cultural in McKenzie's sense but also civic, enabling writers to participate actively in different communities. This issue's contents also emphasize the power of demonstration. Associated idiomatically with protests and academically with epideictic, demonstrations "anticipate the presence of others," in Lawrence J. Prelli's words, and they can be used to "prove (through making purported facts known), make manifest (by showing valued artifacts for immediate inspection), and enact (through staging the context for viewing [or encountering] purported facts and valued objects)" (14, 15). In this mode writing performances have the potential to catalyze any number of responses, from praise and blame to contemplation, inquiry, and instruction. Writing performances are also performative, and the performances assembled here yoke the production of knowledge, identities, and relationships to the production of texts in a variety of ways. Moreover, as online performances or digital scholarship that cannot be enacted fully in other mediums, the contributions to this issue cast in relief a critical fusion of invention and delivery: an integration of the rhetor's search for and deployment of available conceptual and material resources.
This journal's inaugural turn to performance, then, is a concerted effort to increase awareness and the accessibility of performance using the particular means that born-digital scholarship affords. The turn to performance is also an invitation. In 2001, as part of her editorial commitment to "represent[ing] as much as possible the broad range of scholarship that is done in rhetoric and composition," Marilyn Cooper published the first online CCC article (9). Introducing Jim Henry's "Writing Workplace Cultures," she urged readers "to take advantage of the space of the web," "to experiment with formats and presentations styles not possible in the print journal," and to submit their own digital scholarship for future online publication (201). In the spirit of theatrical revival, I want to reissue Cooper's call and welcome as well as challenge scholars, teachers, and students alike to submit their performance scholarship to this and other appropriate venues. I am also proud to be republishing "Writing Workplace Cultures" in this issue, where it appears as an appendix to Henry's follow-up study, "Performing Professionally as a Writer: Research Revival Vlogs."
Although it is important to look back as we move ahead, and though I have emphasized the lines of connection between CCC Print and CCC Online, I recognize that it is not possible to swim in the same river twice. Nor is it possible to attend two performances of the same play. The river is always changing, and each interaction among actors, producers, playscript, and audience members has its own contours and chemistry. So, as the curtain goes up on this journal and its first issue I join Bump Halbritter in self-consciously taking a stage once held by Cooper and Todd Taylor, Deborah Holdstein and Collin Brooke, and others. In the company of their shadows and their online and archived contributors, we offer seven new articles created by 17 scholars. Their work can be previewed here [inset link to next section] or reviewed directly [insert link to main navigation].
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II: Issue Overview
Call for Contributions: The first special issue of CCC Online will examine the performative turn that is currently underway. Contributions spanning historical scholarship, quantitative and qualitative research, pedagogical reflection, and creative work are welcome [ . . . ] .
Given the resources available through digital publication, contributors to this special issue are especially encouraged to innovate by practicing new definitions of scholarship, engaging in new displays of evidence and data, and staging new interactions between authors and audiences of scholarly publications.
When the call for contributions to this issue went out, neither Bump Halbritter nor I knew what to expect. On one hand, performance has been developing as a subfield within rhetoric and composition for the better part of a decade. I first took notice at the Alliance of Rhetoric Societies Conference in 2003, when all but one plenary speaker mentioned performance explicitly. Programs from the annual CCCC provide one measure of subsequent growth, and the following year I counted only a dozen presentations on performance topics, while the 2012 program lists upwards of 75. Numerous hallway and email conversations also inform my perception, as do the discussions I had and the bibliographies I collected during the 2009 RSA Summer Institute Workshop, "Performance and the Rhetorical Tradition." On the other hand, in May 2010 I was not at all sure how best to gauge scholars' interest in both performance and digital academic work, and the the CFC began to look (at least to me) less like a promise than a dare.
Whether the call registered as a pledge, a provocation, or a plea, Bump and I received a total of 65 proposals along with a glimpse of the incredible creativity and intellectual richness of current performance scholarship in our field(s). With equal parts interest and admiration we read place-based inquiries into diverse scenes of contemporary writing lives (e.g., city neighborhoods, small towns, departments, classrooms). We reviewed proposals juxtaposing spoken and graphic words against photography, video, and sound in an impressive range of ratios, and we learned some of the many ways that students, teachers, scholars, and community educators marshal performance as an agency for all kinds of multimodal academic and social work. Choosing from among this embarrassment of riches was enormously difficult, not least because we had material for at least two journal issues plus several sections of a critical sourcebook on rhetoric, composition, and performance. Ultimately, however, we selected proposals that promised rigorous scholarship well suited to digital publication—and to pushing the envelope. As we explained in the letters we sent to this issue's contributors, we chose their work because we believed it would—and now does—"engage both performance and online publication in ways that can bring new attention as well as new insight to shared disciplinary concerns."
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"The Turn to Performance" is framed by two works that engage performance as a means of challenging our assumptions about the combined production of knowledge and texts in rhetoric and composition. The lead article, "What We Did in Our Class," is a collaboration by Daniel Anderson and three of his students: Jackclyn Ngo, Sydney Stegall, and Kyle Stevens. Theirs is a tour de force demonstration of multimodal writing and writing pedagogy that models the dialogical possibilities of remix at its best. In "Installation, Instantiation, and Performance" Jacqueline Rhodes and Jonathan Alexander issue a different set of challenges at the same time they anchor this issue in the materiality of language and the physicality of scholarly bodies. Offering a manifesto for "installation rhetoric" or IR, they compel us to consider how alternative academic forms such as "the multimediated or performative installation" might heighten our experience and understanding of professional knowledge production both at conferences and beyond.
Rhodes and Alexander are not the only contributors who draw on the power of performance to queer expectations and norms or, in Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's words, "to open [the] mesh of possibilities, gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning (8)." "Prompts, Props, and Performativity: Commemorating Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick" also queers instruction and the academy while celebrating Sedgwick's life, work, and legacy. Somewhat curiously, given her immense insights into reading and language as well as queer epistemologies, Sedgwick's work has been far less cited by rhetoric and composition scholars than other performance theorists, and Judith Butler's name appears three times more often than Sedgwick's in CCC. As a corrective, then, the miniature anthology Mark McBeth, Ian Barnard, Aneil Rallin, Jonathan Alexander, and Andrea Lunsford contribute demonstrates how thick with ongoing importance to us Sedgwick's work is.
Consistently in Performance Studies and in this issue of CCC Online, performance involves play as well as theatrical plays, and it involves acting in the sense of repeating or re-presenting everyday behaviors in deliberate, often defamiliarizing ways (Schechner). Performance also involves individual and collective rituals that have the potential to promote positive change (Turner). "Remembering Ghosts and the Rhetoric of Collaboration: A Play and Text for Teachers and Writers" by Keith Dorwick, Bob Mayberry, Paul M. Puccio, and Joona Smitherman Trapp is an occasional play presented through a series of mediations that reclaim the fourth canon of rhetoric while examining "the ways in which we both inhabit and are inhabited by the memories of those who have come before and after us." Both the contributors to "Remembering Ghosts" and Kevin DiPirro call attention to the classroom as a stage as well as a site of intense collaboration. For DiPirro in "Devising/Revising Student-Centered Pedagogy," the classroom is also a site for exploring the parameters for both students' and teachers' performances of authority.
Both Jim Henry's and Jamie "Skye" Bianco's contributions move attention from the classroom to off-campus locations and from teaching to research. Henry's "Performing Professionally as a Writer: Research Revival Vlogs" returns to the project he conducted for Writing Workplace Cultures to make a series of methodological interventions. Rather than reinterviewing his original subjects, Henry invites six to "perform their own experience" for vlogs that, in turn, CCC Online audiences can access directly in order to perform their own analyses alongside related past and present work. Similarly, Bianco's "#inhabitation" performs a succession of interventions into contemporary writing research through a combination of camerawork, sound engineering, and critical theory. The result is a phenomenology of preoccupied spaces that, as the hashtag in the title suggests, compels us to explore the limits and possibilities for describing data (including information gleaned from experience) and making it accessible over time. As Bianco explains, she is "looking for ways that we might change the shape, sound, look, rhetoric and delivery of scholarship," and she is "looking for ways to bring everyday compositional creativity back into knowledge production and scholarly forms." Although she is writing about her own work, she could be writing about the collection of scholarship in this issue, when she singles out "the extra-discursive, the performative, and the affective dimensions of experience and thought [that] galvanize this project."
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III: Epilogue
There are other senses beside the visual (and more than the five senses we have long assumed). There are other modalities besides texts and images. There are other practices besides reading and looking. There are other turns besides the textual and the pictorial. —Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett
The turn to performance is one of the "other turns besides the textual and the pictorial" that Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett alludes to in a conversation with Marianne Hirsch and Diana Taylor reprinted in the October 2005 issue of PMLA. Ostensibly they are discussing the value of replacing "so-called old critical terms such as "representing" and "narrative" with new terms such as "mediating" and "performance." At various turns, however, their conversation verges toward the nature and practice of scholarship when that activity involves not only written and printed texts but also artifacts, theatrical reenactments, and new media. Acknowledging the limits of extant critical approaches in such contexts, Kirshenblatt-Gimblett calls for the kind of "media-specific analysis" that Katherine Hayles champions, and she solicits new practices that might similarly "force [scholars] to work with and against . . . sedimented meanings in new, old, and multifarious situations" (1502).
As teachers and scholars respond, it is fitting to find performance at the fore. Not only does the turn to performance confirm what Jon McKenzie terms an epistemic shift "from discipline to performance"; it also reverses the turn away from performance that helped define the modern academy. During the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, performance lost value while writing gained currency in as well as outside the university. Despite the prominence and importance of lecture pedagogy, anatomy theater instruction, and speaking and debating societies, print ideology conferred ultimate academic authority on individual authors and recorded, written and printed documents. Similarly, even with the prevalence of performance in the extracurriculum (e.g., the worlds of work and entertainment), print was the medium that accrued capital as a commodity capable of being conspicuously circulated and owned.
Now, however, against a changing cultural and material backdrop, performance comes to the fore in relation to both the production and the reception of contemporary scholarship. The changes are most evident in conjunction with new media and can be understood in rhetorical terms. For example, in "Hypertext and the Rhetorical Canons" Jay David Bolter argues it is not appropriate to think conventionally about texts "when the computer is used both to create and to present" them (97-98). His claim is based on observing how multimodal hypertexts have the capacity to defy the linearity of written and printed discourse and to challenge the traditional relationships among rhetorical canons. In general, print logics encourage us to think of invention, arrangement, style, memory, and delivery in sequence, with delivery as the primary site of contact between sender and receiver. On screen, in contrast, invention, arrangement, and delivery belong not only to authors but also to watchers, listeners, and readers: individuals who perform their own composing process by clicking available links and discovering content in an order of their own devising (100). Indeed, as Bump slyly illustrates in his initial promo video for the journal, we are interactivators, and we carry our expectations for interactivity with us not only to screens but also to stacks of print media.
The resulting question—which is shaped and incited by, but not limited to digital academic work—is how do we recognize contemporary scholarship? In 2001, Cooper answers this question with reference to evaluation, assuring readers that online articles "undergo the same review process and are eligible for the Braddock Award along with the other articles published in a calendar year" (201-202). In his introduction to this issue, Bump responds differently. Focusing less on judgment than on use, he emphasizes scholarship as something we can navigate, cite, and access repeatedly over time. These are both good answers, however it remains to be seen whether and how they help the colleague who remains an avowed technophobe or the graduate admissions committee that struggles with the array of genres and media they receive as writing samples. Although all indicators suggest that the future is now—after all, the latest issue of Profession features a cluster of articles about digital academic work—tenure and promotion committees still gravitate toward print, and our profession continues to calculate achievement by page count while benchmarking merit by monograph.
As CCC Online joins the ranks of peer-reviewed digital publications, "The Turn to Performance" special issue invites ongoing creative consideration of questions about scholarship. It encourages a performance-minded attitude or acceptance of the idea that contemporary scholarship, like performance, "resists conclusions" along with "the sort of definitions, boundaries, and limits so useful to traditional academic writing and academic structures" (Carlson 189). Cheryl Ball and her colleagues at Kairos model this contemporary enterprise. As Ball describes in Inside Higher Ed, their three-stage peer-review process remediates scholarship as conversation through "lengthy discussion" as well as the written exchange of "thousands of words" per issue. There is an intensely pedagogical aspect to this kind of editorial work, and a similar sense of scholarly engagement informs this journal, too. As Bump and I instructed issue reviewers: "[A]ll of us involved in the editorial work of this journal will need to approach the works we review with a sense of openness and a willingness to engage in critical play. That is to say, we will need to approach evaluation as an act of dancing between a sense of knowing—about our field, about our topics, about our histories, about our missions—and a sense of growing."
As the audience filters out, the Special Issue Editor continues typing. The house manager enters with his staff, and the quickly collect discarded programs, abandoned water bottles, and stray gloves and hats. The crew clears the stage simultaneously, and when they are done someone wheels in the ghost light, turns it on, and exits. The SIE continues typing, while occasional voices can be heard from the foyer: "Building is more than just brick and mortar and a lot of hard work. Building is people . . . people with hopes and dreams . . . people with problems to solve . . . " (Halbritter).
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Works Cited
"Administration of the Communication Course: The Report of Workshop No. 14." College Composition and Communication 1.2 (May 1950): 43-44. Print.
Bolter, David Jay. "Hypertext and Rhetorical Canons." Rhetorical Memory and Delivery: Classical Concepts for Contemporary Composition and Communication. Ed. John Frederick Reynolds. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1993. 97-112. Print.
Carlson, Marvin. Performance: A Critical Introduction, 2e. London: Routledge, 2003. Print.
Composition and Communication in WRD. University of Kentucky College of Arts and Sciences. n.d. Web. 3 January 2012.
Cooper, Marilyn. "From the Editor." College Composition and Communication 53.1 (September 2001): 9-10. Print.
---. "From the Editor." College Composition and Communication 53.2 (December 2001): 201-202. Print.
Cosgrove, Cornelius. "What Our Graduates Write: Making Program Assessment Both Authentic and Persuasive." College Composition and Communication 62.2 (December 2010): 311-335. Print.
Drake, Francis E. "Developmental Writing." College Composition and Communication 1.4 (December 1950): 3-6. Print.
Fishman, Jenn. "CFC/The Turn to Performance: A Special Issue of CCC Online." The Coalition Archives. The Coalition of Women Scholars in the History of Rhetoric and Composition. 21 May 2010. Web. 13 December 2011.
Fishman, Jenn and Bump Halbritter. Letter to Performance Issue Accepted Proposal Authors. 1 August 2010. Personal Copy. Print.
Halbritter, Bump. "Infrastructure Special Issue Promo Vid." Bump Halbritter, PhD. July 2010. Web. 12 December 2011.
---. "Initial CCC Online Promo Vid." Bump Halbritter, PhD. April 2010. Web. 13 December 2011.
Halbritter, Bump and Jenn Fishman. Reviewer Guidelines for CCC Online 1.1. 7 February 2011. Personal Copy. Print.
Jaschik, Scott. "Kill Peer Review or Reform It?" Inside Higher Ed. 6 January 2012. Web. 7 January 2012.
Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara. "Editor's Column: What's Wrong with These Terms? A Conversation with Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett and Diana Taylor." PMLA 120.5 (2005): 1497-1508. Print.
McKenzie, Jon. Perform or Else: From Discipline to Performance. London: Routledge, 2001. Print.
"The Organization and Use of the Writing Laboratory: The Report of Workshop No. 9." College Composition and Communication 1.2 (May 1950): 31-32. Print.
"Performance." OED.com. The Oxford English Dictionary. n.d. Web. 9 December 2011.
Prelli, Lawrence J. "Introduction." Rhetorics of Display. Ed. Lawrence J. Prelli. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2006. 1-38. Print.
The Program for Writing and Rhetoric. University of Colorado at Boulder. n.d. Web. 3 January 2012.
The Program in Writing and Rhetoric. Stanford University. n.d. Web. 3 January 2012.
Roberts, Charles W. "Foreword." College Composition and Communication 1.2 (May 1950): 3. Print.
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Tendencies. Durham: Duke University Press, 1993. Print.
Stabley, Rhodes R. "After Communications, You Can't Go Home Again." College Composition and Communication 1.3 (October 1950): 7-11. Print.
Well, Edith. "College Publications of Freshman Writing." College Composition and Communication 1.1 (March 1950): 3-11. Print.