[A bit of an off week for me. I don’t usually go more than a couple of days without writing here, but this was our last full week of classes, with all of the meetings, events, and scramble that that implies. On top of that, a friend passed away this past week; many of my regular readers will know to whom I refer. Last year, we brought him to campus as the keynote speaker for the event that I was organizing this week (our annual Spring Teaching Conference). The coincidence didn’t necessarily make things awkward, but the grief hit at some odd times as a consequence.
Anyway, I’ve been digging into Dan Davies’ The Unaccountability Machine: Why Big Systems Make Terrible Decisions - and How The World Lost its Mind (no Bookshop link yet) and enjoying it, so expect to hear more about it soon. In the meantime, I want to return one last time to Kornbluh’s Immediacy, and pick up the thread that I dropped in a footnote almost a month ago now.]
It feels like I’ve been chipping around the edges of Anna Kornbluh’s Immediacy for the past month or so, which has been a different approach from the one I took with some of my more recent reviews. To be honest, I’m okay with that. It approximates the way my writerly brain works: when I read something new, I tend to mull it over for an extended period time so that it can reach out, link up, and form new networks with things I’m already thinking about. (And if it doesn’t form those connections, I typically forget about it after a while.) A comment I left for myself in the margins of Immediacy, for instance, was about “accountability,” which ended up being the reason it was on my mind when I came across the Davies book I’m currently reading.
But I didn’t want to move on completely before I’d returned to the footnote from my opening post on Kornbluh’s book. It was a bit surprising to me to see her address “university writing pedagogy” in that space, but that surprise soured when it felt like rhetoric and composition (my discipline) was actually being misrecognized.
In her chapter on “Writing,” Kornbluh is mostly focused on autofiction as the exemplar of a turn away from postmodern irony (and mediation) in literature. In tracing this trend, she ends up considering not only MFA programs but the kind of courses that my colleagues and I teach: “one elementary tributary to first-personalism in the echelons of MFA workshops is surely the pedagogy of the freshman composition courses required of virtually every college student in the country.” Which is fair enough, I suppose. There are many FYC (first-year composition) programs housed in English departments where courses are taught by graduate students getting advanced degrees in literature and/or creative writing.
She might have argued that, given the population of teachers responsible for FYC, it’s no wonder that the values circulating in literary culture would find their ways into those classrooms. But instead, my discipline is treated more as cause than effect. The evidence for this comes from a couple of places, but the first set off my spidey sense:
Voice-centered experiential writing, reflective writing, and metacognitive writing anoint the meta-discipline writing classroom now, where the content of writing is not subject matter1 but the subject’s intellective and spiritual journey toward prose. The famous writing-program director and pedagogy theorist Peter Elbow articulated this sentiment as a basis for college composition: “writing without teachers” is self-directed, process-based generation of as much text as possible in a “freewriting” mode that likens academic writing to diaries and letters.
I wouldn’t claim that this sort of thing never happens in writing classrooms, but Kornbluh doesn’t abide by the same epistemic limitations when she argues the other extreme2. And her characterization of the “basis for college composition” comes from a 50-year old book, Peter Elbow’s Writing Without Teachers. I still have my own copy of the book somewhere deep in the archives, but frankly, it was a book whose currency was already waning when I went to grad school in the early 1990s (as I mentioned in that footnote a month ago).
This is not to say that it didn’t at one time play an important role my discipline’s development. But it was a very specific intervention at that moment: the discipline of rhetoric and composition was in the process of establishing itself against a traditional model of “instruction” that didn’t actually teach writing. Instead, professors assigned papers, students wrote and submitted them, and got them back with grades and/or comments. Writing was simply a vehicle for assessment—it was just one of the things that you had to do (like taking a test, or reciting a passage from memory) that demonstrated that you’d done work.
Writing Without Teachers was an important book in that era because it made a case that teachers (in that traditional model) were no more responsible for students learning to write than a basketball hoop is for Caitlin Clark’s ability to rain down three-pointers. Worse yet, imagine that you’re learning to shoot the three, but you’re only allowed to shoot (by yourself) once every few weeks, and if you missed, the hoop would tell you how stupid and untalented you were. You’d be more inclined to visit the court in street clothes, chuck the ball at the backboard, and leave.
Those features that Kornbluh identifies as the “basis” for college writing courses actually have very little to do with contemporary teaching, although they’ve been integrated to a degree. But the point of Elbow’s book, and it’s still a valuable one, is that instruction modeled upon shrunken white elephants is largely useless. No one can be told how to write; they need opportunities to practice, chances to reflect on and improve that practice, and they need to engage with others working through the same issues they are3. This “deliberate practice” isn’t easy to accomplish, especially in an institutional context that depends so heavily on grades and still prizes the passive absorption of information as a gateway to active learning opportunities. Elbow’s work played a key role in getting my discipline to the point it’s at now, but the actual basis for contemporary writing instruction has little to do with spiritual journeys or treating academic writing like diaries. Writing Without Teachers wasn’t about doing away with the mediation of instruction altogether, but about abandoning a model of “teacherly” behavior that was more often interfering with writing instruction than facilitating it.
More interesting to me was how much more relevant Kornbluh’s chapter on “Antitheory” would be to my colleagues. She rips through a number of recent humanities trends—”[t]he flat metaphysics of actor–network theory (ANT), object-oriented ontology, thing theory, posthumanism, and romantic ecological fusionism…the affective turn…[and] computational humanities”—each of which is arguably more compelling to the field of rhetoric and composition these days than Elbow’s work. I would happily read a book that engaged more faithfully with these ideas, because I think there’s something to the idea that they share some deep structure. Here, though, they feel flattened for the sake of the overall thesis; they’re all dismissed as nihilistic “theologies of the negative” that only serve to distract us from real problems and disarm our ability to address them. The argument is pretty daring, though, and as I’ve said, Kornbluh’s writing is engaging, so this is the chapter that probably spun my own wheels the most.
There’s one connection that Kornbluh’s book doesn’t follow, because it wouldn’t have been available to her while she was writing. Her polemic against immediacy could be productively read against the role of AI in writing classrooms. Relying on AI for writing embodies both the temporal and the structural senses of immediacy, and many of the critiques that she levels against immediacy resonate (for me, at least) with a much more cautious approach to its integration into education. A great deal of the hype surrounding AI writers is based on the idea that writing courses (and feedback on student writing) exist solely to generate texts, such that any tool making that easier (more immediate, less cumbersome) would be (in their eyes) an obvious net gain. However, this hype (which disguises the complicity with big tech that Kornbluh also critiques) ignores the fact that the work (and mediation) writing requires is actually the point of our required courses. If the only point of basketball was watching the ball land in the hoop, we’d pay money to sit in a stadium to watch a ball machine, which wouldn’t make anyone a better player, but it’d make the machine’s owner rich.
In short, I think that Kornbluh’s critique of immediacy is an important one for me and my colleagues, just not in the way that she imagined when she included us in her list of targets. More soon.
I could cite a dozen examples refuting this sentence, but I’ll settle for the fact that substantial discussions in our field (writing about writing) aren’t about whether to write about subject matter (an issue long settled) but about what that subject matter should be. Reflection and metacognition likewise don’t mean for us what Kornbluh seems to think they do.
Put more bluntly, there are tens of thousands of FYC courses offered every year across the country (at our mid-sized university, we teach hundreds a year); claiming to know what happens in all, or most, or even many of them is a project that would take several years to accomplish, after which the data itself would be out of date.
By sheer coincidence, I came across Scott Young’s Get Better at Anything today, which sounded awfully familiar. It’s a book about how “When we're able to learn from the example of other people, practice extensively ourselves, and get reliable feedback, rapid progress results.” Compare that with what Hart-Davidson says in his piece (linked above) about “deliberate practice,” and you’ll have a better idea of what “university writing pedagogy” looks like today.
I am very glad to have these "off week" words to read. Hoping to get a little more on here soon.
I agree with you here, Collin. Thanks for writing this.
I have found Harmut Rosa's on acceleration a better touchstone than immediacy.