Clifford Geertz on Writing and Rhetoric

208 Journal ofAdvanced Composition

Clifford Geertz on Writing and Rhetoric
LISA EDE

TheJAC interview with Clifford Geertz provides elegant confirmation-if
anyone needed it-of the reasons why this "closet rhetorician's" work has
drawn the attention of many in Composition studies. Geertz, along with such
scholars as Donald McCloskey (The Rhetoric of Economics), James Boyd
White (Heracles' Bow: Essays on the Rhetoric and Poetics of Law), and
Dominick LaCapra (History and Criticism), has helped catalyze what has
been variously called the "rhetorical turn," the "turn to interpretation," or
the "epistemological revolution" in the social sciences. Geertz has helped
map the changes that post modern life and thought have entailed. Essays like
"The Way We Think Now" and "Blurred Genres: The Refiguration of Social
Thought" have functioned for many as intellectual signposts, enabling
scholars in a variety of fields to make provisional sense of the intellectual
ferment surrounding them.

Composition and Pluralism
Geertz is an articulate scholar whose work transcends the boundaries of his
own discipline; he is also a self-conscious stylist who has reflected for some
time about what it means to be a writer, an author. Thus, not surprisingly,
there is much in this interview to interest compositionists. Geertz's descrip-
tion of his own composing process, for example, stands as a striking reminder
of the way in which our field's writing-as-process-not-product "revolution"
has too often hardened into a repressive orthodoxy. If Geertz enrolled in a
freshman composition course today, would his teacher insist that this "essen-
tially one draft" composer couldn't possibly write an effective essay unless he
revised numerous times? And would Geertz-who describes himself as
writing "from the beginning to the end, and when it's finished it's done"-be
forced to manufacture messy-looking freewrites and rough drafts to please
his composition teacher, as some students now do?
     Geertz is a forceful advocate of the usefulness of ethnographic research;
this interview includes a number of comments directly applicable to those
conducting such research in composition studies. Unlike many scholars,
particularly social scientists, Geertz is also acutely aware of the extent to
which a project like After the Fact, his current effort "to think about how I
function[ed] as an anthropologist in a certain time," is as Geertz says "a
writing task" (emphasis added). What more elegant affirmation could those

Reader Response 209

engaged in writing-across-the-curriculum efforts ask for? And Geertz's
reasoned and reasonable comments on multiple literacies, on the futility of
trying "to construct some kind of high old tradition" to which all students
must submit, are certainly heartening. It is reassuring to know that this
internationally-known scholar working at the prestigious Institute for Ad-
vanced Studies is "against the Allan Bloomean sort of business."
     Geertz sees a number of similarities between anthropology and compo-
sition studies. Both are relatively new disciplines; both are inherently
interdisciplinary; and in both there is at times "a great deal of anxiety" over
what the field is. Describing himself as an "inveterate fox," Geertz suggests
that scholars in composition studies should not become dismayed over our
field's seeming chaos. Instead, we should "try everything," avoid "premature
closure on anything." This advice appeals to my own pluralistic sensibilities.
But there's pluralism-and then there's pluralism. Pluralism can encourage
healthy diversity and conflict; the resulting "atmosphere of debate" can,
Geertz observes, "make for a vital and alive field." However, pluralism can
also be a dodge; it can leave important questions not just unanswered but
unasked.
     Geertz comments, for instance, that even in a pluralistic discipline
scholars must be "somewhat critical and not just do any silly thing." This
sounds quite genial and commonsensical, but how do we finally determine in
specific cases what comprises a reasonable versus a "silly" (or possibly even
dangerous) research effort? And to what extent might the apparent open-
ness and flexibility of pluralism mask strongly entrenched intellectual, emo-
tional, and political commitments? Geertz himself notes that if scholars in
composition believe that certain things are ''vital,'' they therefore "need to
support them." How do we determine whether scholars are reasonably and
appropriately supporting their beliefs through professional argument or
whether they are attempting "to fasten some sort of hegemony onto things"?
Conversations in lAC, recent letters in the "Comment and Response"
column of College English, and well-publicized arguments over the proposed
freshman composition curriculum at the University of Texas at Austin
indicate that there can be considerable disagreement over questions such as
these.
     So I find myself both attracted to and suspicious of Geertz's call for
pluralism and for reconciliation between the humanistic and social science
research models currently contending for dominance in many fields, includ-
ing composition studies. Like Geertz, I don't like to think that scholars in the
humanities and social sciences "don't have anything to say to each other or
offer each other." But how do scholars with strongly divergent assumptions
and methodologies forge a synthesis without resulting in "one big mish-
mash"? And does pluralism automatically ensure diversity and conflict, as
Geertz seems to suggest? Couldn't it also mask the agreement to disagree
politely, rather than to confront differences?

210 Journal ofAdvanced Composition

     I have no answer to these questions; I simply want to point out that
Geertz's genial, liberal approach may have the limitations of, well, genial
liberal approaches. The questions that Geertz has clearly given much
thought to-whether fields like anthropology and composition studies can
be too diverse, the benefits and dangers of pluralism-are questions that we
must continue to ask. We must also recognize that terms like "pluralism"
themselves require critical scrutiny, lest we rely upon commonsensical (and
hence unexamined) understandings of their meaning.
     It was Geertz who first taught me to look with particular attention at that
which seems most commonsensical, most obvious. It is there, Geertz notes
in "Common Sense as a Cultural System," that we can often see how a culture
or discipline "is jointed and put together," that we can discover assumptions
so strongly held and so broadly shared that they remain unstated and thus
uncontested (Local Knowledge 93). Reading Geertz's essay helped Andrea
Lunsford and me realize, for instance, that it is hardly an accident that
English teachers have assumed single authorship to be the norm. Rather,
English teachers, like others in the humanities, have long held the pervasive
commonsensical assumption that writing (particularly "real" or belletristic
writing) is inherently and necessarily a solitary, individual act. Once we
recognized the power that this largely unexamined assumption held for
teachers of writing, we realized that our study of collaborative writing,
Singular Texts/Plural Authors: Perspectives on Collaborative Writing, needed
to examine the concept of authorship itself. It is no accident that Clifford
Geertz is mentioned in the first paragraph of our study.
     Precisely because it is so obvious, the wisdom of common sense can be
hard to recognize, much less analyze. "There is something," Geertz com-
ments in "Common Sense as a Cultural System," "of the purloined-letter
effect in common sense; it lies so artlessly before our eyes it is almost
impossible to see" (92). As I worked on this response, I found myself
wondering if there might be one or more purloined-letters hiding in plain
sight in Geertz's interview that might productively be analyzed. I would like
to devote the rest of this response to one such potential purloined letter:
Geertz's conflation of "rhetorical analysis" and "literary criticism."

Geertz's Conception of Rhetoric
Despite his fondness for and understanding of Kenneth Burke, Geertz's
rhetoric seems grounded in the conservative tradition of technical rhetoric.
In identifying rhetoric with literary criticism, in assuming that rhetorical
analysis involves the New Critical close reading of texts, Geertz implicitly
characterizes rhetoric primarily as formalistic analysis. Geertz asks many
sophisticated questions about the relationship ofauthors and texts-questions

Reader Response 211

that certainly need to be asked by those in the social sciences who have looked
to science, not the humanities, for models and methods. But in exploring the
factors that "make discourse particularly persuasive," Geertz focuses on
such traditional concerns as "how composition occurs, how the text is
constructed, how the argument is developed, and why it is or isn't persua-
sive."
     These concerns are part of rhetoric's domain, but rhetoric-and cer-
tainly rhetoric as it is evolving in response to poststructuralist critical
theory-involves more than traditional textual analysis. A number of theo-
rists have drawn on rhetoric's emphasis upon and grounding in the rhetorical
situation to argue that rhetoric can provide a means of analyzing the textual
production of identities and of social relations. This view of rhetoric is
articulated by Terry Eagleton, who closes his well-known Literary Theory:An
Introduction by caIling for a return to rhetoric, which he characterizes as
follows:

      Rhetoric in its major phase was neither a "humanism," concerned in some intuitive way
      with people's experience of language, nor a "formalism," preoccupied simply with
      analyzing linguistic devices. It looked at such devices in terms of concrete performance.
      . .. It saw speaking and writing not merely as textual objects, to be aesthetically
      contemplated or endlessly deconstructed, but as forms of activity inseparable from the
      wide social relations between writers and readers, orators and audiences, and as largely
      unintelligible outside the social purposes and conditions in which they were embedded.
                                                                                          (206)

Rhetoric, as articulated by Eagleton and others, is concerned with and
provides opportunities to explore the contingencies of history and ideology.
Thus characterized, rhetoric goes beyond purely textual matters such as "how
the text is constructed, how the argument is developed, and why it is or isn't
persuasive" to consider the interplay of culture, politics, and ideology in the
production and legitimation of texts.
     Geertz's description of his current project,After the Fact, indicates that
he recognizes the importance of reflecting on issues such as these. In
attempting to look back on his previous studies in order to "describe the work
I've been doing with myself in the picture," Geertz potentially at least is
moving from an exclusive focus on the relationship of authors and texts to an
examination of the anthropologist's rhetorical situation. In order to examine
"the ideological framework" under which he operated from the 19508 to the
19708, Geertz may need to go beyond a concern for "reflexivity" in order to
address the larger questions of the nature of the subject and the relationship
of the text to the historically, politically, and ideologically contingent world
in which it is situated. The fact that Geertz has found postmodern discussions
of "problems of representation and of the relation of power in representa-
tion" to be "issues that we can no longer pass off' bodes well for his inquiry.
I, for one, am looking forward to the publication of After the Fact, knowing

212 Journal ofAdvanced Composition

that, as always, I can anticipate not only a good read by a sophisticated and
witty stylist but also a challenging exploration of "The Way We [or at least
one thoughtful, articulate anthropologist] Think Now."

                                                                Oregon State University
                                                                     Corvallis, Oregon

Works Cited
Eagleton, Terry. Literary Theory: An Introduction. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1983.
Geertz, Clifford. Local Knowledge: Further Essays in InterpretiveAnthropology. New York: Basic
     Books,1983.
- . Works and Lives: TheAnthropologistasAuthor. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1988.

Work with Us, James Sledd: A Response

M.   ELIZABETH WALLACE

As a member of the MLA's Committee on Academic Freedom, Professional
Rights and Responsibilities, I was eager to let James Sledd ("Why the
Wyoming Resolution Had to Be Emasculated," lAC 11.2) know that his 1988
petition about the exploitation of graduate students and part-timers had not
gotten lost. Although his impression is that his "little document was assigned
to some committee, and I have heard no more about it," we have heard quite
clearly the continuing concern of MLA members that speaks through his
petition-and that has spoken through MLA open meetings and convention
sessions, through publications, and through individual letters for many years
now. Wearedoingourbesttoact. We too are frustrated by how little we seem
to be able to do and how slow progress seems. We often feel we're losing
ground rather than gaining it. However, we do tty to make alliances wherever
we can, to discover colleagues working elsewhere on these issues, and to
support their work or collaborate whenever possible (for instance, the