Teaching Bartleby

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Teaching Bartleby to Write: Passive Resistance and Technology's Place in the CompositionClassroom Author(s): Gregory Palmerino Source: College English, Vol. 73, No. 3 (January 2011), pp. 283-302Published by: National Council of Teachers of EnglishStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25790476Accessed: 20-03-2015 20:59 UTC

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283

Opinion: Teaching Bartleby to Write: Passive Resistance and Technology's Place in the Composition Classroom

Gregory Palmerino

"Nothing so aggravates an earnest person as a passive resistance."

?Herman Melville, "Bartleby the Scrivener" (par. 3)

Ever since he was first introduced to me during my undergraduate years as a

bumbling English major, the specter of one of literature's most enigmatic and forlorn characters?in whom Herman Melville brilliandy depicts the idea that the line between doing and not doing, succeeding and failing, sanity and

madness is entirely precarious and utterly razor-thin?has haunted my fragile, yet

imaginative, psyche. Nowadays, as a bumbling but earnest English teacher, I am more

concerned with Melville's unnamed narrator than I am with his tide character. The reason? I have come to recognize an unnerving trend in my composition classroom: the explicit refusal on the part of a growing number of students to do any writing.

I am well aware that this may not be news for many composition teachers, past or present. I imagine apathy is as old as education itself. As Tom March puts it, "Who hasn't heard that wrenching response so common among young people, the verbal shrug of complete apathy: 'Whatever'" (16). Even as I write these words, I get the feeling that I am saying nothing and everything all at once. But a recent experi ence with one particular student has awakened a realization that I had previously overlooked or refused for some reason to fully acknowledge, in the same way that

Melville's unnamed narrator is eventually awakened to his humanity by Bartleby.

Gregory Palmerino is a writing specialist and first-year writing instructor at Mitchell College in New

London, Connecticut. He also teaches composition as a part-time instructor at Manchester Community

College, where he met the student described in this essay.

College English, Volume 73, Number 3, January 2011


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284 College English

First Texts

Donald Murray wrote that all writing is autobiography, "and that our autobiography

grows from a few deep taproots that are set down into our past in childhood" (67). I would like to extend Murray's idea and suggest that all teaching, too, is autobiog

raphy. Therefore, in the spirit of Murray and of Melville's surrogate author, "Ere

introducing the [student] in question, it is fit I make some mention of myself (par.

2). I am one of those writing teachers who focus, albeit too myopically sometimes, on students who are engaged, who are enthused, who are learners. This is not to

say that I do not struggle with, and often suffer for, those students who themselves

struggle and suffer with writing. As a former teacher of journalism as well as com

position, I often apply the old journalistic ethic first uttered by Finley Peter Dunne, "Comfort the afflicted, afflict the comfortable." In other words, I do nurture needy students when necessary and challenge strong students when appropriate. That is

just good teaching. But my classroom also reflects my upbringing. I am the son of Italian and

Polish descendants, the product of a mill-town mentality and a blue-collar mode.

Everything about that upbringing informs my teaching: the way my hands gesticu late lively during discussions; the heightened volume and often sarcastic tone of my voice when I am making a wry comment; the contorted facial expressions when I am

uncomfortable, challenged, or confused; the crude language and abrasive analogies that sometimes accompany my outrage and my humor. I bring to the classroom my

early life as a gym rat and my Cold War service in the United States military, along with a personal and professional attitude that at least hopes to loathe pretension and celebrate authenticity, whatever those evolving concepts in me may be. My love

for literature and my work as a poet inform and strengthen my simple belief that most of what we need to know can be found in the nature of things. As a result, I am continually attempting to strip myself bare for my students so that I may better connect with them and teach them. This approach, of course, can often be awkward and sometimes embarrassing. But it is my way of modeling for my students what I am continually asking them to do in their writing?be vulnerable.

The student I am about to consider here, however, somehow fell outside that influence with a dramatic display of indifference. I suppose that is what I have realized

thinking about him: there is an alternative reality in my classroom that is unaffected

by my presence, and this one student has made me realize how many more students seem to be slipping into it than ever before.

The student in question is a bright, articulate eighteen-year-old, who for all intents and purposes presented as an average, middle-class, white male. He was

comfortable in the classroom, offering his opinions and dissents thoughtfully and

courteously. He was neither disruptive nor disrespectful to either his fellow classmates



Opinion: Teaching Bartleby to Write 285

or me. He conducted himself in a way that suggested he was shaped by good schools and an equally good family. The first-year composition course he was enrolled in at

the large community college where we met has a rigorous vetting process: placement tests, faculty evaluations, SAT requirements, and developmental courses. So I was

confident that his writing skills were adequate, if not solid, for the Comp 101 course I

teach on Saturday mornings. In short, there was nothing alarming about his presence.

Except he didn't do any writing. The first-year composition course where we met gathers once a week for

three hours in a twenty-first-century writing lab with state-of-the-art technology for instruction, including ample room for traditional class interfacing, and separate

computers for each of the twenty-four registered students. Each class period is

divided evenly for the most part into theory and praxis. In the first half, I present a

range of rhetorical reading and writing skills and strategies, from active reading to

classical appeals to audience, including a class on visual rhetoric; the second half is

directed writing, in which the students exercise the concepts with my guidance and

peer support. Over the course of a fifteen-week semester, students are required, by

English department fiat, to write fifteen pages of revised and edited text, through three separate thesis-based writing assignments. Essays are centered on readings from an anthology chosen by me that offers diverse renderings of American "myths" (for

example, success, education, freedom) by authors from as early as the nineteenth

century to the present. Students are asked to choose their own readings on which to

base their essays and class discussions. As students move through each writing assign ment, they collect their work in a portfolio for their own ongoing self-assessment and

instructor feedback. Grades are not assigned to individual essays but to the portfolio as a whole, using a three-pronged assessment approach: revision, progression, and

self-reflection. However, a detailed grading rubric is included in the syllabus based on Council of Writing Program Administrators' guidelines.

When I confronted my Bardeby after class one morning with what I felt was

his blatant lack of productivity, he nodded, made a feeble attempt at a sincere smile, and walked away without a word. I remember gazing at the back of his head dumb

founded. He did not actually say the words, but they seemed to emanate from his

wake?"I would prefer not to."

For the next two weeks he was not to be seen. With my prior astonishment

subsiding, I surmised he had withdrawn from the course, figuring he was just another

student who had dropped one of my classes for any number of personal or academic

reasons. To my surprise, he returned. Maybe he has resolved to start anew, I thought. On the contrary, he continued to operate in the same old frame of mind, preferring not to write. After midterm grading, his attendance remained piebald, and he usually exited the classroom early after the discussion/lecture portion of class. On the last



286 College English

day of the semester there he was, sitting as if nothing was amiss. Subsequendy, his

was one of the most disconcerting Fs I have ever entered in my grade book.

Unable to shake him from my consciousness for about a year after, I slowly

began to understand what had transpired between us, as I was goaded to see all of my students and myself in a new light. As a result, I believe I have discovered something

meaningful about both of us and, in turn, discovered something insightful about

Melville's story that seems equally edifying. I hesitate to call the type of student I am describing an "at-risk" one. Not un

like most first-year college students, he is certainly lacking in some basic study skills

and time-management strategies that prevent him from succeeding in the college classroom. But there is something more disquieting going on here. It is not only that

he and those like him struggle with being college students; most first-year students

I encounter in the classroom do struggle. But he manifested this characteristic in a

way that deviated radically from the norms I have experienced and come to expect from my students over the dozen years I have been teaching first-year composition. As Mariolina Salvatori and Patricia Donahue claim, "When the student disappears, so does the possibility of monitoring theoretical self-absorption" (32). Our students'

lives are the first texts that we must read as closely as the compositions they write.

Otherwise, we will be left reading disembodied words, rather than human com

munication.

Most of my composition students increasingly operate with the same dramatic

indifference toward writing as my Bardeby. There are students who would prefer not to hand in writing because they are put off by poor grades, challenging com

ments, or more writing; students who would prefer not to remember to hand in

writing because of their complex and distractable lives; students who would prefer not to write multiple drafts because they disregard time-management strategies or

the honing of an academic work ethic; students who would prefer not to manually edit and proofread their essays, relying solely instead on computers for spelling and

grammar checks because they are convinced that writing is simply a mechanical

activity rendered automatic; and finally, students who would prefer not to write

because they have been so tainted, so scared by writing "dead letters" for the first twelve years of their academic life that they withdraw from the idea of partaking in the composition process, seeing me or the entire enterprise as dehumanizing and abstract. This last type of student is where I may have found my Bardeby?and me.

This loose kind of teacherly taxonomy likely reveals more about my autobiog raphy and my idiosyncrasies as an educator than it does about the true nature of the students I have openly set out to "read." As William Blake wrote, "To generalize is to be an idiot"?a condition I find myself constantly fighting to avoid. I fully believe that students must be embraced as individuals, and I try to practice this belief con

sistendy. To me, these students are the Turkeys, the Nippers and the Ginger Nuts




of the composition classroom. They provide diversity, range, challenge, and, oddly enough, balance: "Their fits relieve each other, like guards," says Melville's lawyer (par. 13). And they make for a familiar and predictable experience in the composition classroom. Also, I am quite certain?having spent many years as a student myself? they are "reading" me as well; it is one of the unavoidable and exhilarating challenges I recognize and accept each time I encounter a classroom full of dubious faces. In fact,

much of this essay is possible because an individual has emerged who intensely and

completely resisted my preconceptions and expectations in the same way, I believe, Melville's unnamed narrator is challenged by Bardeby. Ironically, my Bardeby has made me cognizant of my comfort, and in turn he has made me uncomfortable.

Recognizing him, thinking about him, and writing about him afford me the

opportunity to reexamine, refocus, and share my concerns in the process of teaching writing. In so doing, I hope to retune myself to the ideal that we as writing teach ers should aspire to, that is, inspire our students to make better choices. In March's

words, "[EJngage them in the joys of learning, of making meaning, of being part of something larger than themselves, of testing themselves against authentic chal

lenges. We can shift them from passivity and consumption to action and creativity" (17). One of my greatest concerns in this pursuit is that technology has hijacked the

composition classroom?hijacked it so completely that it may be too late to combat

the effects. And the student(s) I describe in this essay is as much a representative of our contemporary world's technological revolution as Melville's Bardeby represents the raging Industrial Revolution of the mid-nineteenth century, with its attendant

"dead letters" and dehumanizing automation.

Disembodied Selves versus Knowledge of a Person

Much has been written and said, for good or ill, on either side of the issue about our current fascination with technology. As Albert Borgmann cautions, "The very

identity of the human person and the very substance of reality are presumably called

into question by developments in artificial intelligence, in genetics, and in virtual

reality. Reactions to these prospects are as divided as they are to carnival rides?they

produce exhilaration in some people and vertigo in others" (9). Although it will

become obvious that I am more a critic of technology than a proponent, it is not my final intention to evaluate the merits or disadvantages of this pervasive and inexorable

movement. Those arguments are already being thrashed out by an impressive array of

thinkers, scholars, and social critics. My goal is to analyze the behavior of a student who

seems to represent the perfect profile of a fascinating individual: the passive-resistant student.

Consequendy, by determining some meaning from Melville's doomed character, who I now see is as relevant today as he was over 150 years ago, I can emphasize the place technology must inhabit between composition teachers and students of



288 College English

composition. But it is this world of technology that we must comprehend if we are

to understand the growing number of Bardebys in our midst. With an emphasis on

the wisdom of literature and the power of language, I will attempt to convey my

understanding of the sweeping and unpredictable technological phenomenon in

which we find ourselves adrift.

First, the strange reality of involvement/noninvolvement. Some years ago I

heard the disturbing story of two teenagers who vandalized a house while the home

owners were away. Not unusual in itself, but the teens filmed their activities with

a hand-held video recorder and exhibited the crime to their friends. Word eventu

ally got round to the authorities, and the teens were apprehended. I remember a

psychologist at the time trying to explain to a journalist why these juveniles would

record their crime and then exhibit the incriminating evidence voluntarily. His ex

planation hit me like an iceberg: "If it is not recorded, it did not happen." In other

words, we live in an increasingly ahistorical world, one that requires, if not demands, that events be electronically filmed, documented, and catalogued, lest they become

non-experiences or, worse, disavowed. The only way the teens could give meaning to

their meaningless act was to videotape it, thereby providing proof to themselves and

others that they had acted. Dorothy Singer and Jerome Singer, in Imagination and

Play in the Electronic Age, suggest that exposure to an increasingly audiovisual world

may be the contributing factor in our children's "development of an autonomous

ongoing consciousness but with particular constraints. Looking and listening alone

without other sensory inducements can be misleading guides to action" (113). Such

sensory deprivation leads to desensitization and thus a greater chance for the type of unconscionable behavior described earlier.

My point in retelling this story is not to suggest that we have documented our

world accurately only in words, or that words should trump, or are more important than, technology. This is not an argument about the value of the Bayeux Tapestry or

YouTube. On the contrary, it is an attitude toward technology that I am interested in here: the relative ease, accessibility, and disembodying traits that may be foster

ing a mindlessness manifested in the composition classroom as passive resistance. As

Kristie Fleckenstein observes in her apdy tided book, Embodied Literacies: Imageword and a Poetics of Teaching, this

habit of spectacle?restricting us to a decontextualized and ahistorical immediacy? offers us important insights into writer's block and identity block. [. . .] [S]tudent writer-readers can easily grow into the belief that, in addition to having nothing to

say, they have no reason to write, no authority to write. In effect, citizens of a society of spectacle are acclimated in their own passivity, their own conviction in the impos sibility of an alternative reality. (55)

For those juveniles to have boasted of their story with words and not a recorded image would have been ineffective and untrustworthy. In our postmodern, technological




world, words have lost their function in conveying an individual's lived experience and therefore its place in thoughtful action. In the final analysis, technology allows many

people to act (or not act) with impunity because their (in)actions are not ingrained through animate language but inanimate technology. "But, with language," Fleck enstein insists, "we can be the observer of our own participation, dipping into that stream of experience at will and reflecting on that stream. [...] Furthermore, language offers us the possibility of reality testing" (28, 29). The anecdote I recounted, then, is indicative of my Bardeby's behavior and a major indication of the shifting tide of our students' angle of vision toward reality: the technological experience is a more

acceptable state of reality because it is less discriminating, that is, less judgmental.

Technology is certain, exact. In a word, it is safe. We can turn it off when we

get tired. We can replay it when we get confused or forget. We can turn down the

volume when someone is too loud. We can avoid the distractions of classmates and

environment?odors, lighting, temperature?because we are in control of the on/

off switch. During embodied interactions, on the other hand, our senses are put on

alert. We are affected by the size of people, their smell, the sound and volume of

living, breathing, speaking human beings. Human interaction forces us to confront

uncertainty and discomfort and, yes, anxiety?our own and others'?in the same

way the individual at the center of this essay has disturbed me. Is it any surprise that our students find comfort and trust in such non-human experiences? They appear to be more stable than the increasingly unstable world of reality. Maybe Jean-Paul Sartre was right. Hell is other people.

The calculus here is the difference between the technology-centered acquisition of material and the human quality of imagination: the former centers learning on

the technology itself, that is, its spectacle or, more accurately, its capabilities; the latter centers learning on intrapersonal and interpersonal growth through embodied

language.

Regrettably, the lifeline that is required to pull students up into the conscious

world of meaning has been yanked away by the ease and comfort of technology, which

is not only the opposite of the learning process, but opposed to it. Technology is

unquestioning and indifferent. It is antisocial. Arguments that claim all non-human, that is, nonverbal, forms of communication as technology miss the point. There are

degrees of separation and complexity that must be accounted for. The act of learn

ing and of learning how to write, specifically, is a uniquely human act. It forces us to

recognize an "other." That other can be either the individual self or the larger social

audience. In either case, the human being is (and must remain) the hinge. Writing is such an intimate affair, and by extension so is the teaching of writing. Without

the body's corporeal presence, what kind of ends can be achieved? According to

Fleckenstein, "[W]e need to position ourselves within the fusion of image and word, within imageword so that we write-read [and teach] from the center of a poetics"



College English

(6). It is this "center" about which I am most concerned in this essay. Misplacing

technology?either by mindless accident or theoretical intention?threatens the

body's presence. As such, it threatens effective teaching, active students, and mean

ingful compositions. If we are so intent on removing the messy process of presence from learning in

general, how then can we expect our students in the composition classroom to take us seriously when we extol the virtues of writing as a process, which is ostensibly filled with fits and starts, uncertainty, dead ends, new beginnings?life? Such a notion

reminds me of another nineteenth-century writer who made a similar observation

about surgical operations:

Surgeons must be very careful When they take the knife! Underneath their fine incisions Stirs the Culprit?Life!

Emily Dickinson was well aware of the fact that disease and sickness are conditions

of a living, breathing human being, and that when one seeks to rid the body of its

ailments, one is cutting out what is a component of one's embodied experience. In

many ways, composition teachers are like surgeons, and they need to perform their

function with the same kind of care and awareness. Writing is fraught with error. It

is messy and scary. As such, writing is one of the most purely human acts. Its teaching and formulation, therefore, must remain as closely connected to the human condition as possible. Richard Smith describes a more authentic form of philosophical inquiry for education?and one I would use as a definition for authentic learning through composition?as "the lively process by which embodied, realistic and perhaps real

people are challenged to examine their ideas and prejudices and to think more care

fully and richly [,...] [which] insists on the live contact between individuals that

implies some minimal knowledge of a person" (29; emphasis added).

Anjanette Darrington's analysis of her experience teaching an online course at Arizona State University hints at one of the major disadvantages of teaching writing through technology rather than with it: "Vivid though my personality in the classroom may be, students in an e-classroom are unlikely to witness it; likewise, my

interpersonal communication skills are extremely inhibited by the absence of the nonverbal cues of communication" (418). Although the teacher's personal expression is one I relish and one I believe is invaluable, what about the students? One of the

great joys of teaching in today's composition classroom is the opportunity to partake in its multiple displays of diversity: the sight of different-colored faces; the various sounds of melodious and exotic dialects; the pungent smells of home and work life; the numerous idiosyncrasies that emerge through attitudes, dress, and mannerisms.

They all get washed away with the anonymity and sterility offered by technology.




Of course, there are those who will say, yes, they all get washed away, but so do bias,

prejudice, discrimination, racism, and sexism. My response? I would much rather

be part of a situation that allows me to personally witness and, I hope, foster an oc

casion when those barriers are smashed?and take my chances with failure?rather

than be a mere participant when they are simply circumvented or, worse, neglected. If there is any sense of "vertigo" expressed in this essay, it is the realization

that one of the few places where I find myself acting courageously and with a sense

of purpose on a daily basis?other than raising a family?is being threatened with

extinction by the technological exigency invading the composition classroom.

How would my Bardeby and I have interacted and learned from each other had I been teaching a composition course online? Without the benefit of each other's

physical presence, I do not believe it would have been possible for us to experience what Richard Rorty calls "the sparks that leap back and forth between teacher and

student" (qtd. in Smith 30). I certainly would have been deprived of a profound and

transforming learning experience had I not been given the opportunity to feel in

person those sparks (or pangs) from my Bardeby. I like to think that he also walked

away from the experience with some effect.

There may be an additional explanation here as to why something as obvious as absenteeism is an ongoing issue in the college classroom and office-hour visits:

there is a serious lack of embodied consciousness (minimal knowledge of a person) in

our students. For example, a class that meets on Monday and Thursday is not "hap

pening" on Sunday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday, when a student's

individual consciousness is not in class. All is suspended because the possibility of an

unknowable or unimaginable physical reality fraught with anxiety and contingency has been suspended. Without the presence of the student's consciousness, the class

itself ceases to occur. Cut class, then, and the student has easily and conveniendy eliminated its attendant requirements and demands. Moreover, students who arrive

late to class do so in the belief that they have not "missed" anything because class

does not start until their self-affirming consciousness arrives. (See AJ Daulerio's

blog post for one of the more humorous email exchanges on this topic, between

New York University professor Scott Galloway and a not-so-conscious student.) That there possibly could be continuity to instruction/discussion of other persons is incomprehensible to the student who adheres to this kind of hyper-subjective individualism. Never has "out of sight, out of mind" been so true. The concept of

beginnings and endings is lost on a consciousness that desires only to experience its

own self-affirming existence, an existence that has been seriously limited by what I

would call the tyranny of subtraction: the individual goal to eliminate discomfort rather

than overcome it. For example, who among us has never sent an email message they

probably would not have presented face-to-face? In a composition course where



292 College English

time on task is paramount in terms of quality and quantity, this lack of embodied

consciousness is not only self-defeating?it is annihilating. In his essay "The Human Touch," Lowell Monke explains the disconnect: "What

'Information Age' values tempt us to forget is that all of the information gushing

through our electronic networks is abstract; that is, it is all representations, one or

more symbolic steps removed from any concrete object or personal experience. Abstract information must somehow connect to a [student's] concrete experiences if it is to be meaningful" (11). The composition classroom can and must play an

important role in making this connection between the abstract and the concrete. In

four unflappable lines of poetry, William Buder Yeats expresses the vital role the

body plays in the act of composing, while at the same time making an interesting comment about the precarious movement of the postmodern individual away from

physical reality:

Hands, do what you're bid; Bring the balloon of the mind That bellies and drags in the wind Into its narrow shed.

Anyone familiar with Yeats's poetry will understand why he would have been so

concerned with keeping his thoughts grounded in his cranium. There also may be

the seeds here for an interesting argument about keeping the handiwork of writing

intimately connected to the process. I am not of course advocating for a return to

quill and parchment. What I am suggesting is that distance matters, and the farther

away from the physical process of writing we get, the less relevant language and

corporeal presence become. This is an argument about the difference between the

needleworkers of the Bayeux Tapestry and the performers of YouTube. I am con

vinced that the teaching of writing will work best only when we start by subduing the

abstracting qualities of technology rather than uplifting them, mistakenly thinking that technology is a magical means for freedom of expression or freedom of any sort.

Hyper-Subjective Individualism (Content) versus Democratized Selves (Context)

The movement toward the hyper-subjective self has been well documented by numer ous authors and quantified in lighthearted surveys like the Narcissistic Personality Inventory (NPI), which shows a 30 percent rise in the self-centered attitudes of col

lege students since 1982 when the test was first introduced ("College Students"). But the issue is more serious than mere egocentrism, which often can be explained away as arrested development or more recendy as "the commodification of self (Davis).

What we are dealing with now is an entrenched solipsism: the physical world has

increasingly ceased to exist for our students.




Thomas Carlyle, again in the nineteenth century, famously equated writing with

democracy. Invent writing, he wrote, and you invent democracy. I would go one

step further: write and you democratize the self. The kind of "self' I am describing, however, is not a person's "real" self, which often concerns itself with existential

concepts of identity, or "free" self, which often concerns itself with the denial of

social or individual boundaries. Instead, I mean a democratized understanding of self; the etymological ordering of the word democracy?demos: people; cracy: rule?is the self I am describing, a self that recognizes human predominance in relationships and affairs. Writing and writing instruction that recognize this order are two of the most

effective means for achieving the kind of personal and social freedom I do eventually want for my students and myself.

Thomas Recchio, in "A Dialogic Approach to the Essay," articulates elegantly much of what I have been describing and the important role composition plays in

combating this undeniably established technological reality or, more accurately,

non-reality:

The act of writing fills the gap between self and other through language. Writing is, within this paradigm, essentially affirmative; it implies the possibility of transcending one's own subjectivity, of escaping solipsism through language. Such an enterprise must be filled with doubt, and that is where the essay finds its strongest appeal. For the essay exploits the uncertainty of the writer's situation, transforming uncertainty into a fundamental quality of the essay form. (100-01)

Writing that places the technological act ahead of the writer will most often fail to

"fill the gap" because the medium will remain the message rather than act as the

messenger of meaning. In other words, technology accelerates the shift away from

"knowledge of a person" to hyper-subjective individualism by further disembodying experience from language and inculcating one into the strange reality of involve

ment/noninvolvement, thus dangerously distancing oneself further from democracy. So much of our daily life is spent surrounded by technological precision that we

have lost touch with the democratizing spirit that creates it. We have reached a point where technology is most dangerous. I am describing what Landgon Winner, in his

essay "Technologies as Forms of Life," has termed "technological somnambulism":

the idea that we are sleepwalking our way through a technological world that is not

of our own making or of our own understanding (57). Technology has become so

invasive and pervasive in our lives that we no longer recognize the power it has over

our mental, physical, and spiritual well-being. Consider the British Petroleum (BP) oil disaster or the almost 40,000 motor vehicle deaths each year in the United States

because a driver has been rendered unconscious to the fact that he or she is hurtling

through space at once unimaginable speeds. Likewise, if technology is driving the

teaching of writing (and education in general), what ends are we speeding toward?



294 College English

"Ah, happiness courts the light, so we deem the world is gay; but misery hides aloof, so we deem that misery there is none," opines Melville's narrator (par. 89).

Kathleen Blake Yancey describes a telling example of the intersection of technol

ogy, students, and writing. In the spring of 2008, thousands of Advanced Placement

(AP) students networking on Facebook conspired to play a joke on readers of AP

exams by writing the phrases "This is Sparta" and "This is Madness"?two phrases that cry out for explication?in place of actual answers. One could easily substitute

the phrase "I would prefer not to" with the ones the students used, because they were responding correcdy to a system, the education system no less, that is supposed to be embracing them as future thinkers, citizens, leaders, and potentially better and

freer human beings. However, the students involved never really "jeopardized" their

performance on, or their relationship to, the test (Jacobs par. 10). Felicia Wu Song, in her article "Social Networking Sites," describes the disembodying effects caused

by the ubiquitous phenomena of discourse communities like Facebook and MySpace (and more recendy Twitter):

While we are clearly embodied beings, the salience of physical location has diminished in how contemporary Americans think about and function in their social lives. The best way to describe contemporary sociability is in terms of "networked individualism," overlapping networks of social ties that have individuals at the core of each. People understand "community" in terms of multiple systems of friends, contacts, and acquain tances that span time and place?but are oriented around each independent self. (4)

As I hope to make clear later, those Facebook students are wannabe Bartlebys. To have truly performed a courageous and significant act of composing, they would have

insisted on refusing to take the test altogether. In that case, they would have forced a true human response from their readers rather than the meaningless chuckles and

toothless annoyances they ultimately produced. How is it that we are so utterly bamboozled every day by this kind of techno

logically driven act of composing? The sheer volume of participants (30,000) and the ubiquitous and far-reaching media exposure (Wikipedia, examiner.com, Yancey's report) leave the best and brightest to believe that something actually important has

taken place, that people have joined together and accomplished something meaning ful, when in fact it is simply a prank to get noticed. What is the difference between

these Facebook students who defaced a test and those two teens I described earlier who vandalized a home and filmed their delinquent act? Both acts were recorded, validated by some smart people, and received a lot of attention. Is that what quali fies as a democratic act of composing? I am heartened, however, by one of Yancey's more conclusive explanations as to why the AP students would act in this manner:

"they wanted not a testing reader, but a human one" (6). Kenneth Goldsmith is much more direct in his sundering of the individual and




his or her relationship to language through twenty-first-century technology when

describing contemporary movements in poetic creativity:

Our immersive digital environment demands new responses from writers. [...] Identity, for one, is up for grabs. Why use your own words when you can express yourself just as well by using someone else's? And if your identity is not your own, then sincerity must be tossed out as well. Materiality, too, comes to the fore: the quantity of words seems to have more bearing on a poem than what they mean. Disposability, fluidity, and recycling: there's a sense that these words aren't meant for forever. Today they're

glued to a page but tomorrow they could re-emerge as a Facebook meme. [...] It is

a poetics of flux, celebrating instability and uncertainty, (par. 2)

Unfortunately, the kind of instability and uncertainty Goldsmith is celebrating is not human, it is technological: digital environments "demand" and we must follow.

The connection between the formulation of words and human experience has been

undoubtedly and irrevocably severed. Sincerity is no longer part of the equation. Indifference is king. Goldsmith seems to suggest that this is a good thing. His words are the ultimate expression of technology's final usurpation of human primacy in

language-based communication. It is an attitude, amazingly enough, that embraces

freedom as a form of capitulation.

Poetry aside, the idea of voluntary servitude also can be detected in the rhetorical

stylings of composition theorists advocating for an increase in digital and multimodal

composing. "Informed largely by the demands of commercial and public enterprises that exist in a rapidly changing and increasingly technologically dependent global and

local environments," students need to master certain skill sets as "the next generation of potential employees" so that they can "assume their role as literate, global citizens

in the 21st century" (Selfe and Selfe 85, 86; emphasis added). Are we interested in assimilating technology into the composition classroom because it satisfies the

emerging intelligence of the human being, qua human, or because it fulfills the de

sires of technology/industry, fitting students like cogs into an increasingly obviously

dysfunctional world built on multinational corporations and international financial

institutions? In "The Database and the Essay," Johndan Johnson-Eilola conjures up a more interesting literary comparison when he paraphrases Robert Reich's descrip tion of the wants of emerging market economies:

As intellectual work begins to replace industrial work in our economy, labor theorist Reich identifies a new job classification, one in which people manipulate information,

sorting, filtering, synthesizing, and rearranging chunks of data in response to particular assignments or problems. (201)

If we extend this idea further, we might find

[t]his process of continuous alteration was applied not only to newspapers, but to

books, periodicals, pamphlets, posters, leaflets, films, sound-tracks, cartoons, photo



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graphs?to every kind of literature or documentation which might conceivably hold

any political or ideological significance. (41)

I hope that readers will recognize the latter as an excerpt from George OrwelPs

prophetic work 1984 in which he describes Winston Smith's job at the Ministry of

Truth. In pointing out the comparison, I want to make clear what is at stake: as we

rethink the composing process, are we focusing the discussion on anything other

than the human subject? To couch our arguments in anything else?job training,

employment, industry, technical skills?not only misses the mark, in my opinion, but direcdy undermines composition's highest aspirations: "to produce independent minds, which in self-awareness and self-criticism think and judge on their own"

(Engell 174). Students like the ones Yancey cites are righdy grasping at a lifeline of authen

tic, concrete human communication, one that reinforces human values rather than

undermines it. Unfortunately, they are not conscious of this desire because technol

ogy?their all-encompassing and ubiquitous means of expression?is at once their

lifeline and their anchor. It is the job of the composition teacher to make them

conscious of the fact that their heads may actually be under water. What is needed in

the composition classroom is not a search for more ways to incorporate technology. What is needed is more human relevance.

It seems like an obvious point, but the desire for relevant human experience

through language has to consciously and vigorously contain technology. Otherwise, our composition classrooms will come to look more and more like what Mark Ed mundson has satirically described in his essay, "A Word to the New Humanities Professor." I quote the entire passage to allow the author's sardonic wit and prescient comment to shine through.

As everyone now realizes, the computer is the most significant invention in the history of humankind. Students who do not master its intricacies are destined for a life of shame, poverty, and neglect. Every course you teach should thus be computer-oriented.

Computers are excellent research tools, accordingly your students should do a lot of research. If you are studying a poem by Blake like "The Chimney Sweeper," which

depicts the debasement and exploitation of young boys whose lot, it's been said, is not

altogether unlike the lot of many children now living in American inner cities, you should charge your students with using the computer to compile as much interesting information about the poem as they can. They can find articles about chimney sweep ers from 1790s newspapers; contemporary pictures and engravings that depict these unfortunate little creatures; critical articles that interpret the poem in a seemingly endless variety of different, equally valid and interesting ways; biographical informa tion about Blake, with hints about events in his own boyhood that would have made

chimney sweepers a special interest; portraits of the author at various stages of his life; maps of Blake's London. Together the class can create a Blake-Chimney Sweeper website: www.blakesweeper.edu. (31)




When the multimodal uses of technology find themselves in the driver's seat, such activities will become commonplace in the composition classroom. And the illusion of

creating original texts, for original audiences, will become just another futile exercise similar to what contemporary media is now peddling as info-snacking: information

that satisfies individual schedules and appetites ("News War"). The term itself should

reveal just how much sustenance can be obtained from ingesting information?even

profound information?in this hyper-subjective and disembodied way. Nicholas Carr, for instance, makes an interesting case in his book The Shallows: What the Internet

Is Doing to Our Brains for the dramatic and sustained ebb the human mind may be

experiencing. Writing for the Wall Street Journal online, he states, "[A] growing body of scientific evidence suggests that the Net, with its constant distractions and inter

ruptions, is also turning us into scattered and superficial thinkers" (par. 1). Much of

the general public, however, interprets technological "advances" as democratizing without understanding the power of presence.

Is there any difference between Edmundson's fictional account and the work of a nineteenth-century scrivener? Some readers may argue that the budding Blakeans

have built important and indispensable skills in teamwork, in research, in organiza tion, and, of course, in technical know-how?skills highly valued in the job market, which is what industry, including academia, says we are supposed to be preparing students for as educators. As Pamela Takayoshi and Cynthia Selfe explain, "In an

increasingly technological world, students need to be experienced and skilled not

only in reading (consuming) texts employing multiple modalities, but also in com

posing in multiple modalities, if they hope to communicate successfully within the

digital communication networks that characterize workplaces, schools, civic life, and

span traditional cultural, national, and geopolitical borders" (3; emphasis added). A

scrivener, on the other hand, merely copies what someone else wrote. True enough. But what employer in our corporation-saturated world craves employees who are

capable of and encouraged to scrutinize and challenge information from "within"?

If the current corporate ethos says, "Workers of the world, give us what we want!"

then where will students learn how to challenge when they are taught only how to

communicate within?

Peter Coy, economics editor at BusinessWeek magazine, commented on journal ism's role in the global financial meltdown in an interview on the PBS News Hour:

"[T]he one thing I would plead guilty to is [. . .] a failure of imagination. If you

went back and read [BusinessWeek's] stories, the stories we wrote, if we had drawn

the logical implications of what we ourselves had written, we probably would have

been more bearish" ("Debate" par. 51). First, I would be remiss if I did not mention

that Melville's story is also "A Story of Wall Street," but I leave it to others to take

Bardeby into the myriad directions his tale is always ready to go, as is most great literature (see Carol Jago's report, Crash! The Currency Crisis in American Culture).



298 College English

More important, though, and frightening, is the complete lack of human significance

professional writers themselves see in their own writing?and, for the rest of us, the equally frightening results. The corporatized writers at BusinessWeek magazine

were writing within with as much conscious desire to challenge the inane financial

practices of the banking and investment industries as those Facebook students were

writing within to consciously challenge the standardizing characteristics associated

with high-stakes testing. All sound and fury, signifying nothing. As James Engell

points out in his important book The Committed Word, "Every rhetorical act is social

and political, [. . .] for it requires nothing less than an informed, scrupulous use of

language and?through language?an imaginative vision of human experience, com

munication, and institutions,, (173-74). Composition instruction that does not place

knowledge of a person as its primary goal is not even scratching the surface of significance for our students and our society. Thus we must start with why we choose to compose

(context/place) rather than how many ways there are to compose (content/mode). I have attempted to show how the lack of presence in our society and our

classrooms is a direct result of technology's preeminence in human affairs, specifi

cally writing instruction, where composition teachers play an essential role. Yet, I

believe that most writing teachers know the stakes. In a recent National Council

of English Teachers (NCTE) poll, "respondents tended to look beyond technol

ogy applications and see that success is found in better connecting classroom work to real-world situations that students will encounter across a lifetime" ("Writing" 1). Most composition teachers, I believe, understand those real-world situations as the ones that involve our fellow citizens, our coworkers, our friends, our families, and our lovers. Thus writing and writing instruction are acts that must embrace the human realities of contingency and fallibility rather than try to pass them off as

realities characteristic of technology, which often negates them or, worse, attempts to expunge them. Otherwise, the texts that composition students will learn to create

will be essentially "dead letters" in the same way a copied legal document is dead to a nineteenth-century scrivener. "Dead letters! does it not sound like dead men?" decries Melville's narrator (par. 250). In short, technology must remain a subject of

composition to be constandy scrutinized and interrogated even as we continue to use technology in the act of composing. It is about place, not function.

Conclusion

But what about Melville's Bartleby and my passive-resistant student? Where is the connection? Is the meaningless work of a nineteenth-century scrivener an example of modern-day composing? Are industrial age office conditions the same as techno

logical age classroom circumstances? Is Bardeby's end my student's end? First, the obvious point that great authors do not refrain from killing their main characters so




that their readers will retain some sense of hope; on the contrary, they kill off their creations because they are trying to teach us something about life. For years I thought that Melville's story was a character study in mental illness. Bardeby's retreat is a

descent into madness, a metamorphosis not unlike the one Franz Kafka's Gregor Samsa experiences. Consequendy, Melville's design for writing his novella was to

open a window on that experience so that his readers might better learn to sympa thize with the afflicted among us. In other words, it was a lesson in human compas sion. However, I now see that Bardeby is the only mind full character in the story.

Bardeby's end is the result of an automated and dehumanizing workload, workspace, and world. He realizes this condition and refuses to continue to participate in its

design. His is an act of clarity and defiance. Slavoj Zizek suggests that Bardeby's "I

would prefer not to" is "the gesture of subtraction at its purest, the reduction of all

qualitative differences to a purely formal minimal difference" (382). Unfortunately,

Bardeby's "minimal difference" is the only minimal knowledge of a person left to

him that he feels he can understand or control?his death. Neil Postman reminds us

that Freud, in Civilization and its Discontents, warned of this last grasp at deliverance

(6). Ironically, dying to Bardeby has become the only human expression left of living. I suspect, therefore, that my Bardeby prefers not to write because it is his way of

controlling what he sees as the meaningless, that is, humanless, ends produced in my

composition classroom. He is not acting from a place of narcissism or selfishness or

hyper-subjective individualism. He is acting from a desire for human relevance. My

Bardeby feels free, but he does not experience freedom. Hence, his passive resistance

may be more accurately described as the "human stasis" of postmodern life, what

cultural theorist Paul Virilio calls "polar inertia," or "the discrepancy between tech

nologically generated inertia and biologically induced human movement" (Armitage par. 12). By preferring an academic death, my Bardeby believes that he remains in

control of his individuality, his voice, his freedom?his humanness?when, in reality, the opposite is probably true.

And what about Melville's self-described "eminendy safe" lawyer and my role

as a writing teacher? Am I to blame for my Bardeby's condition? Is there something I should have done to prevent his failing grade? Have I become too comfortable (or

inured) as a composition teacher? Admittedly, I do have many faults and much to

learn about teaching and writing, but I now see Melville's story is ultimately a story about the characters left living. Bardeby may be condemned by his "minimal knowl

edge of a person," but Melville's unnamed narrator, the storyteller, is redeemed by it. In telling the story, the lawyer is communicating the lesson Bardeby has taught him: the "cool tranquility of a snug retreat" (par. 3) he has worked so diligendy to

achieve over the course of his law career is not one of fulfillment, as he originally

thought, but of confinement. Bardeby refuses all overtures of accommodation and

remediation from his employer because he no longer sees him as anything other



300 College English

than another example for his fatal choice: his employer is doing unconsciously what

Bartleby is doing consciously?speeding to death. Once Bartleby decides to cease to

exist, everything and everyone else ceases to exist; in other words, the dead cannot

offer, nor can they accept, help from the dead. The letters invoked at the conclu

sion of the story symbolize the fine line between life in death and death in life: "On

errands of life, these letters speed to death" (par. 250). The letters themselves?at once a representation and product of technology?are indifferent to either condition.

Without human beings qualifying their existence, the letters are meaningless and

useless. Disembodied words equal disembodied readers (and writers). Melville's work of fiction is a metaphor for life just as my analysis of my Bardeby

is a metaphor for a living, breathing human being; it is limited and speculative. As

such, I am under no illusion that I have accurately captured the mind or life of the

individual about whom I have written. However, we have reached the point of my true discovery: / have been subtracted. My approach of openness, sincerity, and vul

nerability?my humanness?which I thought was impervious to indifference and

automation, has been rendered mute. My Bardeby has forced me to recognize that

I may be just another meaningless, faceless abstraction because he may see himself as

just another meaningless, faceless abstraction: two postmodern texts drifting in and out of meaningless contexts. In other words, the cart has been put firmly before the

horses, and I was not conscious of this possibility until I encountered my Bardeby. All the while, it seems, my freedom has been the one jeopardized. That is a conclu

sion I can more confidendy say is not fiction.

Finally, I would reiterate my initial statement that this essay is not about the

advantages or disadvantages of technology; it is about the composition classroom and what place technology should assume in the act of teaching and composing. I am

completely mindful of the fact that the world continues to turn and that technology is not going away. This essay is made possible because of technology, not in spite of it, and I recognize and welcome its benefits wholeheartedly for teachers of writing and for students of writing. Undoubtedly, technology is the number one issue for

writing and for the teaching of writing. From what place will we proceed? I prefer Jean Baudrillard's response: "As for ideas, everyone has them [_] What counts is the poetic singularity of the analysis. That alone can justify writing, not the wretched critical objectivity of ideas. There will never be any resolving the contradictoriness of ideas, except in the energy and felicity of language" (103).

As someone who is old enough and scarce enough not to have been raised by the current supply of technological gadgets and cyberspace communication, I believe I am somewhat conscious of the convenience and efficacy that technology offers me as a means for composing without falling for its obvious spectacle. My concern is that our students do not have this bilateral awareness, and that we are not addressing their

predicament because we (or our institutions) have been mesmerized by technology's




ease and comfort as well as its promise. If this all sounds too curmudgeonly or too

deterministic for some, I will end with a reminder from Jacques Ellul, author of The

Technological Society, which I now know is as important for composition teachers as

it is for students of composition: "Freedom is not static but dynamic; not a vested

interest, but a prize continually to be won. The moment man stops and resigns him

self, he becomes subject to determinism. He is most enslaved when he thinks he is

comfortably settled in freedom. [...] It is not a question of getting rid of [technology], but, by an act of freedom, of transcending it" (xxxiii). Let us, now, prefer to write.

*****

Author's note: I would like to thank John Schilb and the reviewer for their guidance and recommendations throughout the revision process. Thanks also to Christopher Colbath for his suggestion regarding Slavoj Zizek's interpretation of Melville's

Bardeby, and to Patrick Rowley for six years of the most meaningful and enjoyable conversations two colleagues could ever share.

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Article Contentsp. 283p. 284p. 285p. 286p. 287p. 288p. 289p. 290p. 291p. 292p. 293p. 294p. 295p. 296p. 297p. 298p. 299p. 300p. 301p. 302

Issue Table of ContentsCollege English, Vol. 73, No. 3 (January 2011) pp. 221-342Front Matter"We're Here, and We're Not Going Anywhere": Why Working-Class Rhetorical Traditions "Still" Matter [pp. 221-242]Rhetoric and Bullshit [pp. 243-259]Reconsiderations"Inventing the University" at 25: An Interview with David Bartholomae [pp. 260-282]

OpinionTeaching Bartleby to Write: Passive Resistance and Technology's Place in the Composition Classroom [pp. 283-302]Language Difference in Writing: Toward a Translingual Approach [pp. 303-321]

ReviewBasic Writing and the Future of Higher Education [pp. 322-336]

Back Matter

Teaching Bartleby

Documents

Transcript of Teaching Bartleby