The Writing Center Paradox - National Council of Teachers of English

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Instead of helping students “improve” their five-paragraph themes according to their instructors’ advice, we need to some-

how voice our objections to the entire enterprise. The question is how to do this without jeopardizing our students’ best interest as

well as our own. —Patricia A. Dunn, “Marginal Comments on Writers’ Texts”

The university needs us, but we need the university as well.

—Timothy Donovan, “Professing Composition in the Academic Marketplace”

CCC 61:1 / september 2009

Shannon Carter

The Writing Center Paradox: Talk about Legitimacy and the Problem of Institutional Change

Scholarship on writing centers often relies on validation systems that reconcile tensions between equality and plurality by privileging one over the other. According to feminist political theorist Chantal Mouffe, neither absolute equality nor absolute plurality are possible in any democratic system, a conflict she calls “the democratic paradox” and insists is the essence of a “well-functioning democracy” that supports pluralistic goals. The following article argues that a similar logic shapes writing center work and, therefore, any attempt to promote change must likewise embrace the democratic paradox as it manifests itself in the writing center: “the writing center paradox.”

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Text Box

Copyright © 2009 by the National Council of Teachers of English. All rights reserved.

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Writing from her precarious position as a writing center director without tenure, Patricia A. Dunn opens her essay with a tale familiar to many of us—not only those of us in writing center work but writing program administrators and composition instructors alike, virtually anyone trained to think of “grammar” in more productive ways.

Recently I heard through the grapevine that I am “too soft on grammar.” It is said that as director of the writing center I do not insist enough on the eradication of comma splices, and that some of the peer tutors I’ve trained have occasionally failed to recognize several of these in the drafts of students who come to us for help. (31)

We are used to such problematic assumptions about what it means to teach writing and the role of an instructor, a tutor, a writing center, and a writing program in doing so. For more than forty years—at least since the publica-tion of Research in Written Composition in 1963—we have been committed to representing literacy (“grammar”) differently, generating countless arguments against persistant assumptions like those likely informing the accusations Dunn’s colleague made. Like so many teachers upholding current-traditional representations of literacy education, this professor probably assumes that mastery of surface features (what he calls “grammar”) is the foundation of all academic prose and that this mastery must be demonstrated before any other learning can take place. Such a paradigm is commonplace, pervasive, and persuasive to those unfamiliar with composition studies, making it “the dominant rhetoric overall,” and, therefore, “making it impossible for [teach-ers] to conceive of the discipline in any other way” (Berlin 9)—certainly not without meaningful intervention. Such conversations are inevitable and, as we know, regularly extend far beyond the circle of writing specialists reading this journal. In fact, “there are few academic areas—excepting perhaps mathemat-ics—in which the necessity to work with individuals outside one’s own field is so manifest” (Donovan 173).

Despite this inevitability, however, writing specialists disagree about what the focus of conversations like these should be (Smit). The many informed by the process movement, for example, may argue that any conversation Dunn has with her colleague should focus on the pedagogical issues such a claim violates. Rather than critiquing this man’s pedagogy, however, those of us shaped by New Literacy Studies (see James Paul Gee and Brian V. Street, among others) and critical pedagogy (see Paulo Friere, Henry Giroux, Lil Brannon, and C. H.

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Knoblauch) may be more likely to encourage Dunn to focus on the political, social, and cultural issues involved. These schools of thought teach us that the assertion Dunn’s colleague made is merely an echo of the systematic and institutionalized forces that oppress the powerless, the same forces that com-pel the marginalized to assimilate into the dominant discourses of the more powerful. As Henry Giroux explains, arguments like these “reduce [literacy] to the alienating rationality of the assembly line, a mastery without benefit of comprehension or political insight” (206). We know that, as Brian V. Street as-serts, “individuals, often against their own experience, come to conceptualize literacy as a separate, reified set of ‘neutral’ competencies, autonomous of social context” (114). And we are painfully aware that this conceptualization—what Street calls the “autonomous model of literacy”—is ubiquitous. We are com-mitted to social justice and we know that to remain silent about comments like those made by Dunn’s colleague is to perpetuate the injustices embedded in his rhetoric. “Mainstream language” is, as Adrienne Rich puts it, “the op-pressor’s language,” constructed and perpetuated by what bell hooks calls the “white supremacist capitalist patriarchy” (3). According to this perspective, no conversation countering claims that we are “too soft on grammar” should be merely pedagogical but rather, as all pedagogical issues are simultaneously political ones, it should address the social, ethical, and political issues at stake.

Talk about Rhetoric

The five-paragraph essay, and similar creatures of academic archives, along with the pedagogical assumptions from which

they developed, demand interdisciplinary and intergenerational research and discussion. . . .

. . . These discussions may become lively, for they involve deep-seated, fundamental beliefs about the nature of knowledge and learning, not to mention sometimes unacknowledged assump-

tions about gender roles and authority. Somehow, in spite of dif-ferences in status and job security, all members of the academic community need to find the courage and grace to discuss these

important conflicts openly.

—Patricia A. Dunn, “Marginal Comments on Writers’ Texts”

Regardless of whether we choose to focus on the political rather than the peda-gogical or vice versa, any conversation about writing instruction with those unfamiliar with scholarship in composition studies entails a certain amount

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of risk. Inasmuch as we expect Dunn to address the oppressive social forces embedded in this professor’s claim, we must not ignore the material, political, and ideological conditions involved in any conversation she may have with him. “Talk” occurs in what Lorraine Code calls “rhetorical spaces,” and these rhetorical spaces limit and shape all that can and will be “heard, understood, [or] taken seriously.” As Code explains, rhetorical spaces are

fictive but not fanciful locations whose (tacit, rarely spoken) territorial imperatives structure . . . and limit the kinds of utterances that can be voiced within them with a reasonable expectation of uptake and “choral support”; an expectation of being heard, understood, taken seriously. (ix)

The rhetorical spaces making up any possible conversation between Dunn and her grammar-obsessed colleague are necessarily and inevitably laced with conflicting value-sets and epistemological frameworks. For this reason, she is unlikely to persuade him to represent literacy differently without acknowledg-ing these inherent conflicts and negotiating—slowly, carefully, and, above all, deliberately—the power landscape infringing on what’s possible within the effected rhetorical spaces.

While the situation Dunn shares is no less relevant to the rhetorical spaces in which the classroom teacher may find herself—or the writing pro-gram administrator or the WAC director, for that matter—it seems the writing center worker is uniquely situated for investigating the power nexus involved in acquiring new literacies. I argue that the rhetorical spaces of the writing center provide a particularly fruitful ground for examining the power dynamics involved in negotiating and representing academic literacies, especially given that most work with all writers at all levels and from all disciplines. Unlike the classroom instructor, the tutor is rarely responsible for assigning or evaluating the projects (M. Harris); unlike the writing program administrator, the writing center director need not generate a curriculum and evaluation system, cer-tainly not one based on a single representation of literacy. The writing center is made up of a series of rhetorical spaces in which tutors and students attempt to negotiate academic projects assigned by and evaluated by individuals who are not directly associated with/involved in the writing center’s daily activi-ties. We represent the student, not the teacher. We represent the system, not the student. We represent neither, and we represent both. And this is where our conversation with Dunn’s colleague, a man I will call “Professor Grammar,” gets most complicated.

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Talk about Constraint Over the last few decades, scholarship in our field has devoted quite a bit of space to legitimizing our methods and to representing literacy differently. What we have not done is articulate the ways in which we might have this specific conversation about literacy instruction with those insisting that we are not doing it right, especially those who, like Dunn’s colleague, may be “a tenured professor who sits on several powerful committees and votes on my tenure hearing next year” (Dunn 31).

The purpose of the current article is to examine the challenges and pos-sibilities within rhetorical spaces like the one in which Dunn finds herself in order to develop a model for engaging in meaningful conversation that might effect change within similar, largely institutionalized, rhetorical spaces. As Richard E. Miller explains in As If Learning Mattered: Reforming Higher Edu-cation, nothing we do in the academy ever takes place “under conditions of complete freedom,” as much as we’d like to believe otherwise. In fact, there are many “material, cultural, and institutional constraints that both define and confine all learning situations” (7). It is, therefore, crucial that we ask ourselves how one can possibly effect change in a system so profoundly shaped by and dependent on maintaining the status quo.

Talk about a Liberal-Democracy Education with liberal-democratic goals—that is, a desire to create equal edu-cational opportunities in ways that do not circumvent diversity—are irreconcil-able. According to political theorists such as Jürgen Habermas, Carl Schmitt, and Chantal Mouffe, this irreconcilability is an unavoidable consequence of the democratic political process in general. In The Democratic Paradox, feminist theorist Mouffe explores the inevitable tensions rooted in liberal-democratic systems simultaneously guided by, on one hand, a democratic promise to sup-port and protect equal rights for all citizens and, on the other hand, a liberal promise to valorize and support diversity. Ideally, modern democratic institu-tions protect individual and community rights by challenging any attempts to regulate diversity, but the democratic system itself cannot function without some level of homogenization that constructs the “collective identity” of “the people” whose rights will be protected by said system.

In practice, a liberal-democracy that values both plurality and equality creates “the people” by articulating an “us” that can only exist through a si-multaneous articulation of “them.” Thus the liberal-democracy functions in

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ways that at once circumvent true heterogeneity and absolute equality. “The definable feature of a liberal democracy is hegemony,” Mouffe explains, in that the political process of endorsing and supporting democracy demands unity and, therefore, creates inequitable relationships (36). Through the liberal logic of this paradoxical system, those the system treats unfairly (inequitably) de-mand a rearticulation of “the people” who are identified through the political process yet again. Inasmuch as any liberal-democratic system embraces the democratic paradox, this process is unending.

According to Carl Schmitt, “every actual democracy rests on the prin-ciple that not only are equals equals but unequals will not be treated equally. Democracy requires, therefore, first homogeneity and second—if the need arises—elimination or eradication of heterogeneity” (qtd. in Mouffe 38). From this, Schmitt concludes that a liberal-democracy cannot work—it is doomed as a system due to the contradictions in its articulation. Mouffe disagrees. While accepting Schmitt’s description of the inevitable tensions of liberal-democratic governing systems, she defines them as the “democratic paradox” and contends that this paradox is the very essence of a “well-functioning democracy” that supports pluralistic goals.

Thus, like writing center scholar Stephen North, I assert that “talk” is the “essence of tutoring,” but, unlike North, I argue that embedded in that “talk” is the democratic paradox inasmuch as the writing center functions as a democratic institution representing both our students and the literacy demands of the academy, especially as we resist the autonomous model of literacy dominating most rhetorical spaces over which we are not in control. I call this the “writing center paradox” and contend that the problem with articulations of value is that most attempt to reconcile this paradox by either offering equity as the most valuable identification for writing center work or plurality as the primary goal. Mouffe’s key argument is that the democratic paradox is irreconcilable and any attempt to reconcile it will simply replicate the dominant social order. Democratic political systems and, by extension, democratic institutions must resist the impulse to reconcile contradictions and instead keep this democratic paradox open, alive, and conflicted. As Mouffe explains, “the tension between equity and liberty cannot be reconciled and . . . there can only be contingent hegemonic forms of stabilization of their conflict.” Any reconciliation of this tension circumvents “the very idea of an alternative to the existing configuration of power [and] the very possibility of a legitimate form of expression for the resistances against the dominant power relations”

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and, in doing so, allows “the status quo [to] become naturalized and made into the way ‘things really are’” (5). Instead of legitimizing, in North’s terms, “The Idea of a Writing Center” by attempting to resolve the competing logics that generate the democratic paradox, we must heed Mouffe’s advice to “visualize . . . the ultimate irreconcilability . . . as the locus of paradox” (9) so that we may consciously and purposefully engage with and talk about it. Writing center legitimacy may well rest in this paradox—of literacy, of democracy, of writing center identity.

The problem is that much of our rhetoric in writing center studies at-tempts to legitimize writing center work by celebrating our ability to reconcile this paradox. Understandably so, given our belief in the democratic potential of writing centers and perpetual struggles against the marginalization of that im-portant work. In the pages that follow, however, I do not defend writing centers. I work from the assumption that writing centers are essential to literacy work, but the current article is not itself a defense but rather a rhetorical analysis of such defenses. In other words, I am attempting here to investigate the rhetorical construction of writing centers as “valuable” and the consequences—and pos-sibilities—in that construction. In the remaining pages of this essay, I examine regularly-cited validations of the writing center to (1) define and articulate what I call “the writing center paradox” perpetuated in this rhetoric (especially as liberal-democratic goals inform and motivate this paradox) and (2) offer a model that attempts to embrace and engage with the writing center paradox rather than resolve it. After doing so, I return to Dunn’s situation and attempt to apply this new model in ways that might effect change within the rhetorical and material constraints embedded in it.

Talk about Equity (and Assimilation)

If the writing center is ever to prove its worth . . . it will have to do so by describing this talk [that goes on in the writing

center]; what characterizes it, what effects it has, how it can be enhanced.

—Stephen North, “The Idea of a Writing Center”

In “The Idea of a Writing Center,” Stephen North validates the writing center by identifying and justifying “talk” as the “essence of tutoring” (76). “This is an essay that began out of frustration,” he explained, boldly revealing that many reading this College English publication were “the source of [his] frustration”

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because they “understand” neither the function nor the value of the writing center, yet they deny their “ignorance, this false sense of knowing, mak[ing] it doubly hard to get a message through” (63–64).

Professor Grammar’s assertion that Dunn is “too soft on grammar” would likely make North no less frustrated, as it is one he is likely to have heard time and again. For North and the many who have followed in his rhetorical footsteps, the value of the writing center is not as a “fix-it shop” or a dry-cleaning service, despite the fact it is often characterized as a place where students should take their papers to get them “fixed” or “cleaned up” before the “real” evaluation (by the teacher) takes place. According to this line of argument, rather than mea-suring “success” in terms of the writing center’s ability to make changes to the paper (“eradicate[ing] all comma splices,” as Dunn’s colleague insists it must), we should assess it “in terms of changes in the writer” (70–71; emphasis added).

North’s “Manifesto,” as those of us in the writing center community often call it, may not be the first public statement of our frustrated relationship with the margins, but it is certainly the most influential justification of its kind. In fact, nearly identical terms (change the writer, not the paper) inform the vast majority of writing center mission statements and training and promotional materials, despite the fact that many critics—including North himself—have since challenged some of the ideological and philosophical grounds on which this justification is based.

In the last decade or so, the terms of change North articulates and many endorse have begun to lose support, especially among those writing center critics who see literacy work in less “innocent” terms (Grimm, “Regulatory”). As Nancy Maloney Grimm explains in her provocative study Good Intentions: Writing Center Work for Postmodern Times, “literacy learning is really a matter of conforming to predetermined expectations which are, for better or worse, set by dominant white culture” (57). She warns us that the “talk” that North describes as “everything” (North 76) may actually serve a “regulatory” rather than a “liberatory” function,” perhaps marking difference as deficit, “normal-izing” discourse, and certainly misrepresenting the complexities of diversity. As Alice Gillam asserts, we often—unknowingly—work as both a “liberating and normalizing agent” for student writers (128). Challenges like these often criticize writing center work according to the “contradictions” embedded in representations like those articulated by North. They describe these contra-dictions as the product of the dual allegiance to assimilation and liberation that defines most literacy education. Marilyn Cooper, for example, exposes the duality in Jeff Brooks’s popular declaration that “the student, not the tu-

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tor, should ‘own’ the paper” (220). In response to the contradictions rooted in this “ownership,” Cooper asserts that “tutors can best help students become agents of their own writing by helping them understand how and the extent to which they are not owners of their texts” (339, emphasis in original). Elizabeth Boquet identifies the contradictions thus: “Writing center theory and practice is a discourse . . . perfectly at odds with itself ” (43). Grimm calls this duality, the one likely informing the “at-odd-ness” Boquet reveals, the “paradox of literacy,” which she defines as “the way that literacy both dominates and liberates, both demands submission and offers the promise of agency” (Good Intentions xiii).

Critics such as Grimm, Boquet, Cooper, Gillam, Anne DiPardo, and Anis Bawarshi and Stephanie Pelkowski assert that contradictory objects and agents of change demand a new kind of “talk.” They reject writing center talk that “changes” writers in favor of talk that changes the institutional systems that often force already marginalized students to change. They challenge validation systems such as North’s that identify “the object” of writing center work as “making sure that writers . . . are what gets changed in instruction” (69) and Kenneth A. Bruffee’s assertion that peer tutoring helps writers “loosen ties to the knowledge community they currently belong to and join another” (215). They condemn “minimalist tutoring” techniques that categorize “the central difficulty we confront as tutors” in ways Jeff Brooks has: “we sit down with im-perfect papers, but our job is to improve their writers” (219). More importantly, they redefine the goal of “talk” in, from, and about the writing center. For Coo-per, the goal is “critiquing institutions and creating knowledge about writing” (336), talk that positions writing center workers as “agents of change in writing pedagogy” (341). For Andrea Lunsford, writing center “talk” should “lead the way in changing the face of higher education [by] challeng[ing] the status quo in higher education” (98). For Grimm, the goal is to facilitate “a social future in which literacy practices enable us to communicate across differences” because “just as postmodernity pushes against the limits of existing modernist beliefs, so does writing center work expose the limits of existing literacy practices in higher education” (Good Intentions x, 2). In other words, the writing center should not represent school literacies as monolithic, neutral, and natural but instead challenge the artificiality of such models by representing the students and the diverse social locations they inhabit.

I endorse these goals, and I, too, would like to see writing center “talk” lead to changes such as those described above. I am, however, increasingly less certain about the change agents they identify and the processes of change they describe. Granted, the systems Grimm, Cooper, and others articulate emphasize

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the political nature of literacy and the tensions inherent in any diverse social space; however, the power dynamics experienced as I attempted to enact these sorts of changes have forced me to rethink their applicability. I’ve come to believe that these models may not adequately address the specific limits and possibilities always already embedded in any democratic institution asserting value. For this reason, they may actually perpetuate the “innocence” they set out to challenge. Validation is an inevitably politicized process of hegemonic articulation with which key scholarship in our field has only recently begun to engage. Writing center identities responding to the “paradox of literacy” acknowledge the political function of writing center work, but the democratic paradox embedded in any articulation of value often gets pushed aside.

Attempts to convince those positioned at the “center” (like our Professor Grammar) that the institutions relegated to the margins have been unfairly placed and largely misunderstood must be examined as rhetorical exercises generated by and complicated by contradictions: the democratic paradox. Any rhetorical construction of legitimacy in rhetorical spaces that include those not yet convinced must identify with some value-sets already considered legitimate. Thus, many validation systems, including those serving North’s “Idea,” make use of the cultural codes already recognized as valid academic currency. In this system, we shape the writing center as valuable to those in power by articulating its identity as a place where marginalized writers learn to mimic more “legitimate” (read “more powerful”) ways of knowing by parrot-ing the dominant cultural codes. Ironically, writing center legitimacy shaped by claims that challenge the dominant cultural codes must also engage with the inevitable power relations associated with them. The same system that funds writing center work, influences tenure decisions, and otherwise forces the marginalized writing center to cling to the “center” shapes the rhetorical spaces that control all validation systems, even those claiming to circumvent that system. Either validation system is necessarily political and paradoxical.

Talk about Diversity

Ohhhh! So you’re the one who’s going to teach these students how to write. They really need your help. My students can barely

cobble a sentence together!—colleague from another department’s response when he was introduced to me during my

first week on campus more than eight years ago

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I am committed to shaping a writing center that honors diversity, generating a series of rhetorical spaces that promote social justice and challenge the in-stitutionalized oppression embedded in literacy education via an autonomous model like the one informing Professor Grammar’s perspective. In fact, as soon as I arrived to begin my first, tenure-track position as an assistant professor of English and director of the Writing Center (and the Basic Writing Program) at a mid-sized, public university in a PhD-granting department, I began the process of shifting the Center from what I perceived to be a program that emphasized the way a writer approached his or her individual writing process to one more invested in the way the writer approaches academic literacy as a cultural construct. But I struggled, time and again, to figure out how to subvert a system on which I was so completely dependent for funding and tenure. I struggled, even as the faculty in my department—which includes many strong, tenured, and well-respected composition scholars—continued to offer their unwavering and enthusiastic support. I struggled, just as we all struggle, to subvert the autonomous model of literacy when the autonomous model was the one largely responsible for the existence of literacy support programs like our writing center.

I was already keenly aware of how important it is for us to “sell” our pro-grams, especially in the beginning when we haven’t yet had the experience to accurately read the power landscapes already in place. I intended to make myself and the writing center I directed indispensable as quickly and emphatically as possible by more firmly establishing our role in writing-intensive classes across the campus. In such a climate, it made little sense for me to confront this profes-sor who obviously wanted his students to succeed but had such a low opinion of their current ability to do so. At least not directly or right away. It would not do for me to lecture this Ivy League–educated man about “the dangers of projecting [his] cultural assumptions onto students who have cultural histories different from [his] own” (Grimm, Good Intentions 108). From my brand-new position representing a scholarly field he never knew existed and thus seemed unlikely to accept had much intellectual value (at least not yet), I had little confidence that I would be able to convince him that the writing center was not a place that “fixes” writers but one that attempts to “grant membership” to students, “accepting them as active knowledge users, knowledge makers, and even ‘paradigm shifters’” (Brandt, qtd. in Grimm, Good Intentions 108). I would be hard pressed to convince this professor—at least not quickly—to value his students as “knowledge makers” and “paradigm shifters” when he did

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not even believe them to be proficient enough to “cobble a sentence together.” Before I could even try, I absolutely had to identify and negotiate with care any rhetorical spaces available for such a conversation.

As a democratic institutional space, the writing center must embrace the paradox embedded in any political negotiation because “a well-functioning democracy calls for a vibrant clash of democratic political positions” (Mouffe 104). Often, however, the validation systems we use to define the writing center in terms of “change” ignore the social function of language and the hegemonic order shaped by and perpetuated by any social system—even the writing center. As Grimm explains in Good Intentions, “writing centers are places where as-similation into the discursive systems of the university is facilitated” (xvi). Inas-much as these writers are already students in the university (though, perhaps, only provisionally admitted), they are “citizens” of the university community and, therefore, protected by the rules of the democratic systems governing that community. However, as these writers write in ways the traditional system may not value, they are not yet full citizens.

The democratic side of what Steve Sherwood has called the writing center’s “helping personality” urges us to develop and implement strategies designed to help writers gain citizenship in that academy by writing like—in fact, becoming like—the other full citizens of the community. In other words, much of the rhetoric we have used to articulate the value of writing centers is infused with an intensely democratic spirit that advocates the rights of the individual foremost with respect to equalizing access to all that is valued within the current system: democratic values such as freedom, individuality, and equity.

Grimm’s “paradox of literacy” draws attention to the ironies at work in this clearinghouse model. Traditional literacy is said to “empower writers” by helping them find success in a given rhetorical space, but to find success in that space these marginalized writers must learn to write in ways the academy values. If literacy education itself is a political enterprise rather than a neutral one, learning to manipulate the dominant cultural codes requires once marginalized writers to become someone else—embody the dominant culture instead of their own. Rhetoric legitimizing writing center work within a liberal-democracy via a logic of equity perpetuates homogeneity under the guise of facilitating equal educational opportunities for all. Such a writing center seems inappropriate when we accept that, as James Paul Gee has argued,

Each and every Discourse makes of us, while we are in it, a certain sort of person; each and every Discourse “calls forth” certain ways of viewing the world, ways of

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communicating to others, ways of valuing and thinking about the world and our fellow human beings. Most of what a Discourse does with us, and most of what we do with a Discourse, is unconscious, unreflective, uncritical. Each Discourse protects itself by demanding from its adherents performances which act as though its ways of being, thinking, acting, talking, writing, reading and valuing are “right”, “natural”, “obvious”, the way “good” and “intelligent” and “normal” people behave. In this regard, all Discourses are false—none of them is, in fact, the first or last word on truth. (190–91)

Given this, legitimacy based on a logic of plurality seems a much more ethical way to shape the writing center, and Grimm’s “rearticulation” of “writing center work for postmodern times” remains appealing to me for primarily this reason.

According to North, the writing center is “one manifestation of a dialogue about writing that is central to higher education” (64; emphasis added). In “Rearticulating the Work of Writing Centers,” however, Grimm redefines writ-ing centers as “sites of knowledge-making” (537) that make these institutional spaces “essential to the pedagogical mission . . . of a university committed to democratic ideals” (536), if only “they can position themselves as partners in a dialogue about institutional response to difference” (593; emphasis added). Grimm would likely argue that Dunn’s conversation with Professor Grammar should not be about “writing” alone—despite North’s assertion that this should be the central function of any talk in and about the writing center—but rather “a dialogue about institutional response to difference.” I admire this goal. Grimm’s deep engagement with paradox and democratic ideals, the “paradox of literacy” she articulates in her later work, and her postmodern, culturally-sensitive agenda develop a writing center identity that seems to embody the politicized one I articulate here. Grimm even cites the tensions expressed in Mouffe’s earlier work as support for the “open,” conflicted writing center identity Grimm articulates. Based on an assumption that “[t]he work of literacy is deeply paradoxical,” Grimm develops a writing center that she asserts will be more attuned to the needs of a pluralistic democracy in the postmodern academy, a writing center that will “maintain openness in discussions about literacy and . . . address the conflicts embedded in our myths without expecting a tidy resolution” (525). Her version of an “open,” “democratic” writing center seems to epitomize the “democratic paradox” Mouffe celebrates, a paradox embedded in, as Grimm puts it, “its respect for difference and its task of governing diversity” (525) in its attempt to “maintain openness” (545) rather than “close down un-derstanding” (543). The talk in, from, and about the writing center that Grimm advocates “challenges . . . a wide range of relations of subordination” (Mouffe

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20), and the validation systems she employs legitimize the writing center in ways I find attractive and convincing. More than eight years ago, after finish-ing a dissertation in writing center politics that was profoundly influenced by Grimm’s theoretical construct, I went on to attempt to “rearticulate” a rather well-established writing center in ways that validated diversity and confronted systems demanding homogeneity. It was in my attempt to translate Grimm’s pluralistic writing center into practice, especially in my encounters with col-leagues like Professor Grammar, that I found myself at odds with it.

Talk about Choice In practice it seems Grimm’s model validates the writing center through an uncritical celebration of “extreme pluralism,” which—according to Mouffe—has the rather ironic consequence of actually limiting diversity rather than enabling it. As Mouffe explains, extreme pluralism is a system “conceive[d] of exclusively in terms of a struggle of a multiplicity of interest groups or minorities for the assertion of other rights” (20). However, democracy always limits plurality—not always by choice but always as a requisite condition for the existence of any democratic institution in that the democratic process requires that a repre-sentative population serve as the “collective identity” for which such rights will be negotiated. Though extreme pluralism seems the most culturally sensitive way to negotiate democratic institutions, it is a position that, in practice, works directly against pluralistic ideals.

Furthermore, this collective identity must be negotiated such that the rights and freedoms of some members do not violate the rights and freedoms of other members. Any limits to plurality work against the pluralistic ideal; any limits to equality via equal rights work directly against the ideals informing the democratic protection of individual rights. The democratic paradox must keep these tensions, limits, and the resulting paradox alive to keep these democratic institutions fair and equitable. Everyone has the right to cultural representation within that current system, but if difference is not an a priori condition but a politicized one, “everyone” simply can’t be afforded equal representation, at least not at the same time and all the time. “Pure” plurality negates the possibility of “pure” democracy, which disrupts pure plurality—a circular and complex series of tensions that make up the democratic paradox and, in turn, inform the writing center paradox.

Not only does the democratic process depend on a “collective identity,” but the practice of developing this collective identity affects the identities of all

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individuals involved. Mouffe urges us to think of it in terms of creating “a rela-tion of contamination . . . in the sense that once the articulation of [democracy and liberalism] has been effectuated—even in a precarious way—each of them changes the identity of the other” (10) and in doing so reshapes the identities of all involved. Since diversity is not an “empirical reality” but one constructed by the democratic process as well, the liberal-democracy that informs the writing center not only excludes some identities in order to include others but actually changes the collective identities of all involved.

In Good Intentions Grimm asserts that “writing centers can function more effectively within the contrastive democratic desire to understand and negoti-ate difference rather than the institutional need to manage or eliminate it” (82; emphasis added). Her decision to mark the institution as a space unshaped by democratic processes overlooks the political reality of the democratic paradox. No social space articulating value in terms of “change” can exist apart from the political process through which power and legitimacy are generated—not the writing center and certainly not the “institution.” By shaping writing centers as capable of changing the “tacit habits of exclusion” at work in the “operations of the academic community” (83) without acknowledging the ways that these “tacit habits of exclusion” function in the operations of the writing center as well (even the pluralistic writing center), her model denies the democratic function of change agents and the political processes making social change possible in a “well- functioning democracy.” “Managing” or “eliminating” differ-ence is no less a democratic function of desire than the “desire to understand and negotiate difference” can be. I do not mean that Grimm’s model ignores the ways that the clearinghouse writing center works to regulate students and perpetuate systematic oppression. She most certainly does not. The problem is that the pluralistic writing center she describes may be similarly complicit. In fact, Grimm’s assertion that writing centers can work more effectively within the “contrastive democratic desire to understand difference rather than the institutional need to manage or eliminate it” (82) fails to acknowledge the fact that the true locus of paradox—the one that is the key to a “well-functioning democracy” (Mouffe)—is embedded in the way “rather than” functions in this dichotomy. Grimm thus reconciles the democratic paradox by drawing atten-tion to “difference” “rather than” the democratic imperative to “manage” or even “eliminate” difference. In that Grimm’s model engages with difference as an “empirical reality” one can communicate to others (“represent”), it ignores the exclusionary practices inherent in any political process of articulation and

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denies the reality of identity formation as the “mutual contamination” Mouffe tells us exists in any democratic institutional space.

In a related and, unfortunately, no less problematic rhetorical move, Grimm’s writing center treats the student as an autonomous knower while simultaneously denying such autonomy can exist. As she asserts in Good Intentions, “If student writers can understand that cultural construction of meaning exist outside themselves, they can choose not to accept positions that undermine their individual histories and motivations” (30; emphasis added). “Writing Center Work for Postmodern Times,” the subtitle of the above publication, lays out some of the most complex challenges to objectivism and individualism that I have seen in writing center scholarship and does so in accessible prose, yet the autonomous knower persists in many of Grimm’s arguments, even as she insists “a postmodern framework” disrupts the notion of an “autonomous individual” (5, 20). To assert that identities “exist outside” each individual without also conceding that such identities are not entirely a conscious choice seems a bit counterintuitive. Either identities are constructed politically and socially or identities exist a priori, isolated from rather than “contaminated by” these political and social negotiations. The former, accord-ing to Mouffe, is exactly how “collective identity” is formed in any political negotiation with liberal-democratic goals and, therefore, is how individuals are affected in any political process. If identities are constructed through the “cultural construction of meaning,” then this meaning must also exist inside the individuals who construct it, not as an empirical reality but rather in the form of their experiences leading up to this political negotiation. Indeed, the process by which meaning is constructed may actually inform individual identities as well. Therefore, code switching, as Gee and others have argued, from one “cultural construction of meaning” to another is not a matter of ac-cepting some positions and rejecting others. The actual process of switching codes among different cultural constructs changes the individual making the switch, a change that can only be minimized if he or she is made aware that no single code is better (more “natural” or “correct”) than any other. Grimm argues that we must make the “unnatural” and socially constructed nature of academic literacies clear to tutors and students alike. In fact, that is one of her most persuasive arguments and the one that has guided me throughout my career thus far. However, I do not see room within her pluralistic writing center, at least not as articulated, for making use of this awareness in conversations with colleagues like Professor Grammar.

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Talk about Compromise Embracing and making use of the writing center paradox in all relevant rhe-torical spaces (both within the writing center itself and beyond) leaves space for what Mouffe calls an “adversarial agonistic contestation of shared values” (121) and accepts that “compromises are always possibilities” in that “they are part and parcel of politics but they should be seen as temporary respites in an ongoing confrontation” (102). Most importantly, it keeps the democratic paradox open and productive, which “requires providing channels through which collective passions will be given ways to express themselves over issues which, while allowing enough possibility for identification, will not construct the opponent as an enemy but an adversary” (103). The model I advocate is committed to “providing” those very “channels” by talking about them and investigating the limits and the possibilities of this talk.

According to North, “If writing centers are going to finally be accepted, surely they must be accepted on their own terms as places whose primary re-sponsibility, whose only reason for being, is to talk to students” (78). When I talk about the writing center in many rhetorical spaces beyond the writing center, however, it seems unwise to demand legitimacy on my own terms—at least not directly or immediately. Instead I must attempt to validate the writing center according to the terms already considered valuable among the more powerful members involved in the rhetorical spaces concerned. Were I to find myself in Patricia Dunn’s specific position, my initial impulse would be to thrust a copy of Patrick Hartwell’s “Grammar, Grammars, and the Teaching of Grammars” into Professor Grammar’s hands and tell him to come talk to me—directly—when he actually knew what grammar was before spreading any more rumors that I am “too soft on grammar.” I find it unlikely that much would be gained from such a move, though I needn’t ignore the conversation altogether. I make room for conversations like these in those rhetorical spaces where the conversation is likely to be “hear[d], underst[ood], take[n] seriously” (Code xi). It may be that relevant rhetorical spaces are available when it comes to folks like Professor Grammar. However, before we embark on any such challenge, we must develop the rhetorical dexterity (Carter) necessary to make the conversation produc-tive and to minimize any negative consequences that it may have on our own positions and the programs we represent.

Keep Talking The validation systems we’ve used to legitimize writing center “talk”—at least since North’s “Idea”—may be understood as either “moral-universalistic” or

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“ethical-particularistic.” The “moral-universalistic” perspective may best de-scribe writing centers privileging the democratic logic over the liberal, which means they likely organize the “common-symbolic space” they are attempting to negotiate in terms of “right” and “wrong,” “good” and “bad,” “normal” and “deviant” (Mouffe 129). The “ethical-particularistic” validation system, on the other hand, may guide writing centers privileging the liberal logic over the democratic. Instead of accepting the current system as a universal standard by which all others should be judged, the ethical-particularlistic validation system looks to the ways in which the current hegemonic order may be unethical in that it endorses a particular worldview and a particular literacy and excludes all others.

But neither articulation of value can serve as a “common symbolic space” shaped by attempts to valorize diversity and protect equality because both attempt to reconcile this paradox, which, as I’ve argued throughout, is an im-possible and unwise task. Writing centers would do better to maintain both validation systems simultaneously, in different rhetorical spaces for different rhetorical purposes. In other words, we may allow ourselves to articulate value in moral-universalistic terms when we must (as we attempt to validate the writing center in terms the current system may value), while at the same time adhering to ethical-particularistic principles in those spaces where doing so is possible (and profitable). The writing center that deliberately and strategically upholds both validation systems is one that keeps the writing center paradox productive and alive—opening it up and keeping it visible, which is only pos-sible as long as we keep talking about it.

Acknowledgments I am indebted to Donna Dunbar-Odom for her insightful responses to the earliest phase of this project, to Texas A&M Commerce for the recent Faculty Development Leave that enabled me to complete the final revisions, and to Lil Brannon and Deborah H. Holdstein for their generous and shrewd feedback in response to a previous draft of this manuscript. An added thanks to Lil for her suggestion regarding a new, more appropriate subtitle. Finally, I am grateful to all the fantastic scholarship in writing center studies that has appeared in the three years since the article appearing here was originally accepted. So much is happening in this field. For that, and so much else, I feel honored to remain deeply involved with writing centers.

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Works Cited

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Shannon CarterShannon Carter is an associate professor of English and co-director of the new Con-verging Literacies Center (CLiC) at Texas A&M–Commerce. The author of The Way Literacy Lives: Rhetorical Dexterity and Basic Writing Instruction (SUNY P, 2008), Carter has published articles in College English, the Journal of Basic Writing, the Community Literacy Journal, and elsewhere on subjects ranging from faith-based literacies to prison literacy to basic writing and writing programs. Carter is also interested in writing with new media, especially video, and has two articles forth-coming in Kairos (one with regular collaborator Donna Dunbar-Odom).

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Documents

The Writing Center Paradox - National Council of Teachers of English